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Title: The Fathers of New England
A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths
Author: Charles M. Andrews
Release Date: August 30, 2009 [EBook #29853]
Language: English
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THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND
TEXTBOOK EDITION
THE CHRONICLES
OF AMERICA SERIES
ALLEN JOHNSON
EDITOR
GERHARD R. LOMER
CHARLES W. JEFFERYS
ASSISTANT EDITORS
THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND
A CHRONICLE OF THE
PURITAN COMMONWEALTHS
BY CHARLES M. ANDREWS
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO.
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD: UNIVERSITY PRESS
_Copyright, 1919, by Yale University Press_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS Page 1
II. THE BAY COLONY " 21
III. COMPLETING THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT " 45
IV. EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE " 72
V. AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION " 88
VI. WINNING THE CHARTERS " 100
VII. MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT " 116
VIII. WARS WITH THE INDIANS " 129
IX. THE BAY COLONY DISCIPLINED " 147
X. THE ANDROS RÉGIME IN NEW ENGLAND " 166
XI. THE END OF AN ERA " 194
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE " 201
INDEX " 205
THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE COMING OF THE PILGRIMS
The Pilgrims and Puritans, whose migration to the New World marks the
beginning of permanent settlement in New England, were children of the
same age as the enterprising and adventurous pioneers of England in
Virginia, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. It was the age in which the
foundations of the British Empire were being laid in the Western
Continent. The "spacious times of great Elizabeth" had passed, but the
new national spirit born of those times stirred within the English
people. The Kingdom had enjoyed sixty years of domestic peace and
prosperity, and Englishmen were eager to enter the lists for a share in
the advantages which the New World offered to those who would venture
therein. Both landowning and landholding classes, gentry and tenant
farmers alike, were clamoring, the one for an increase of their landed
estates, the other for freedom from the feudal restraints which still
legally bound them. The land-hunger of neither class could be satisfied
in a narrow island where the law and the lawgivers were in favor of the
maintenance of feudal rights. The expectations of all were aroused by
visions of wealth from the El Dorados of the West, or of profit from
commercial enterprises which appealed to the cupidity of capitalists and
led to investments that promised speedy and ample returns. A desire to
improve social conditions and to solve the problem of the poor and the
vagrant, which had become acute since the dissolution of the
monasteries, was arousing the authorities to deal with the pauper and to
dispose of the criminal in such a way as to yield a profitable service
to the kingdom. England was full of resolute men, sea-dogs and soldiers
of fortune, captains on the land as well as the sea, who in times of
peace were seeking employment and profit and who needed an outlet for
their energies. Some of these continued in the service of kings and
princes in Europe; others conducted enterprises against the Spaniards in
the West Indies and along the Spanish Main; while still others, such as
John Smith and Miles Standish, became pioneers in the work of English
colonization.
But more important than the promptings of land-hunger and the desire for
wealth and adventure was the call made by a social and religious
movement which was but a phase of the general restlessness and popular
discontent. The Reformation, in which this movement had its origin, was
more than a revolt from the organization and doctrines of the mediæval
church; it voiced the yearning of the middle classes for a position
commensurate with their growing prominence in the national life. Though
the feudal tenantry, given over to agriculture and bound by the
conventions of feudal law, were still perpetuating many of the old
customs, the towns were emancipating themselves from feudal control, and
by means of their wealth and industrial activities were winning
recognition as independent and largely self-sufficing units. The gild, a
closely compacted brotherhood, existing partly for religious and
educational purposes and partly for the control of handicrafts and the
exchange of goods, became the center of middle-class energy, and in
thousands of instances hedged in the lives of the humbler artisans.
Thus it was largely from those who knew no wider world than the fields
which they cultivated and the gilds which governed their standards and
output that the early settlers of New England were recruited.
Equally important with the social changes were those which concerned
men's faith and religious organization. The Peace of Augsburg, which in
1555 had closed for the moment the warfare resulting from the
Reformation, not only recognized the right of Protestantism to exist,
but also handed over to each state, whether kingdom, duchy, or
principality, full power to control the creed within its borders.
Whoever ruled the state could determine the religion of his subjects, a
dictum which denied the right of individuals or groups of individuals to
depart from the established faith. Hence arose a second revolt, not
against the mediæval church and empire but against the authority of the
state and its creed, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, or
Calvinist, a revolt in which Huguenot in France battled for his right to
believe as he wished, and Puritan in England refused to conform to a
manner of worship which retained much of the mediæval liturgy and
ceremonial. Just as all great revolutionary movements in church or
state give rise to men who repudiate tradition and all accretions due to
human experience, and base their political and religious ideals upon the
law of nature, the rights of man, the inner light, or the Word of God;
so, too, in England under Elizabeth and James I, leaders appeared who
demanded radical changes in faith and practice, and advocated complete
separation from the Anglican Church and isolation from the religious
world about them. Of such were the Separatists, who rejected the
Anglican and other creeds, severed all bonds with a national church
system, cast aside form, ceremony, liturgy, and a hierarchy of church
orders, and sought for the true faith and form of worship in the Word of
God. For these men the Bible was the only test of religious truth.
The Separatists organized themselves into small religious groups, as
independent communities or companies of Christians, covenanted with God
and keeping the Divine Law in a Holy Communion. They consisted in the
main of men and women in the humbler walks of life--artisans, tenant
farmers, with some middle-class gentry. Sufficient to themselves and
knit together in the fashion of a gild or brotherhood, they believed in
a church system of the simplest form and followed the Bible, Old and New
Testaments alike, as the guide of their lives. Desiring to withdraw from
the world as it was that they might commune together in direct relations
with God, they accepted persecution as the test of their faith and
welcomed hardship, banishment, and even death as proofs of righteousness
and truth. Convinced of the scriptural soundness of what they believed
and what they practised, and confident of salvation through unyielding
submission to God's will as they interpreted it, they became conspicuous
because of their radical thought and peculiar forms of worship, and
inevitably drew upon themselves the attention of the authorities, both
secular and ecclesiastical.
The leading centers of Separatism were in London and Norfolk, but the
seat of the little congregation that eventually led the way across the
sea to New England was in Scrooby in Nottinghamshire. There--in Scrooby
manor-house, where William Brewster, the father, was receiver and
bailiff, and his son, the future elder of the Plymouth colony, was
acting postmaster; where Richard Clayton preached and John Robinson
prayed; and where the youthful William Bradford was one of its
members--there was gathered a small Separatist congregation composed of
humble folk of Nottinghamshire and adjoining counties. They were soon
discovered worshiping in the manor-house chapel, by the ecclesiastical
authorities of Yorkshire, and for more than a year were subjected to
persecution, some being "taken and clapt up in prison," others having
"their houses besett and watcht night and day and hardly escaped their
hands." At length they determined to leave England for Holland. During
1607 and 1608 they escaped secretly, some at one time, some at another,
all with great loss and difficulty, until by the August of the latter
year there were gathered at Amsterdam more than a hundred men, women,
and children, "armed with faith and patience."
But Amsterdam proved a disappointing refuge. And in 1609 they moved to
Leyden, "a fair and bewtifull citie," where for eleven years they
remained, pursuing such trades as they could, chiefly weaving and the
manufacture of cloth, "injoying much sweete and delightful societie and
spiritual comfort togeather in the ways of God, under the able ministrie
and prudente governmente of Mr. John Robinson and Mr. William
Brewster." But at last new and imperative reasons arose, demanding a
third removal, not to another city in Holland, but this time to the New
World called America. They were breaking under the great labor and hard
fare; they feared to lose their language and saw no opportunity to
educate their children; they disapproved of the lax Dutch observance of
Sunday and saw in the temptations of the place a menace to the habits
and morals of the younger members of the flock, and, in the influences
of the world around them, a danger to the purity of their creed and
their practice. They determined to go to a new country "devoyd of all
civill inhabitants," where they might keep their names, their faith, and
their nationality.
After many misgivings, the fateful decision was reached by the "major
parte," and preparations for departure were made. But where to go became
a troublesome problem. The merits of Guiana and other "wild coasts" were
debated, but finally Virginia met with general approval, because there
they might live as a private association, a distinct body by themselves,
similar to other private companies already established there. To this
end they sent two of their number to England to secure a patent from
the Virginia Company of London. Under this patent and in bond of
allegiance to King James, yet acting as a "body in the most strict and
sacred bond and covenant of the Lord," an independent and absolute
church, they became a civil community also, with governors chosen for
the work from among themselves. But the dissensions in the London
Company caused them to lose faith in that association, and, hearing of
the reorganization of the Virginia Company of Plymouth,[1] which about
this time obtained a new charter as the New England Council, they turned
from southern to northern Virginia--that is, to New England--and
resolved to make their settlement where according to reports fishing
might become a means of livelihood.
But their plans could not be executed without assistance; and, coming
into touch with a London merchant, Thomas Weston, who promised to aid
them, they entered into what proved to be a long and wearisome
negotiation with a group of adventurers--gentlemen, merchants, and
others, seventy in number--for an advance of money to finance the
expedition. The Pilgrims entered into a partnership with the merchants
to form a voluntary joint-stock company. It was understood that the
merchants, who purchased shares, were to remain in England; that the
colonists, who contributed their personal service at a fixed rating,
were to go to America, there to labor at trade, trucking, and fishing
for seven years; and that during this time all profits were to remain in
a common stock and all lands to be left undivided. The conditions were
hard and discouraging, but there was no alternative; and at last,
embarking at Delfthaven in the _Speedwell_, a small ship bought and
fitted in Holland, they came to Southampton, where another and larger
vessel, the _Mayflower_, was in waiting. In August, 1620, the two
vessels set sail, but the _Speedwell_, proving unseaworthy, put back
after two attempts, and the _Mayflower_ went on alone, bearing one
hundred and two passengers, two-thirds of the whole, picked out as
worthy and willing to undertake the voyage. The _Mayflower_ reached the
waters of New England on the 11th of November after a tedious course of
sixty-five days from Plymouth to Cape Cod; but they did not decide on
their place of landing until the 21st of December. Four days later they
erected on the site of the town of Plymouth their first building.
The coast of New England was no unknown shore. During the years from
1607 to 1620, while settlers were founding permanent colonies at
Jamestown and in Bermuda, explorers and fishermen, both English and
French, had skirted its headlands and penetrated its harbors. In 1614,
John Smith, the famous Virginia pioneer, who had left the service of the
London Company and was in the employ of certain London merchants, had
explored the northern coast in an open boat and had given the region its
name. These many voyages and ventures at trading and fishing served to
arouse enthusiasm in England for a world of good rivers and harbors,
rich soil, and wonderful fishing, and to spread widely a knowledge of
the coasts from Newfoundland to the Hudson River. Of this knowledge the
Pilgrims reaped the benefit, and the captain of the _Mayflower_,
Christopher Jones, against whom any charge of treachery may be
dismissed, guided them, it is true, to a region unoccupied by Englishmen
but not to one unknown or poorly esteemed. The miseries that confronted
the Pilgrims during their first year in Plymouth colony were not due to
the inhospitality of the region, but to the time of year when they
landed upon it; and insufficiently provisioned as they were before they
left England, it is little wonder that suffering and death should have
accompanied their first experience with a New England winter.
This little group of men and women landed on territory that had been
granted to the New England Council and they themselves had neither
patent for their land nor royal authority to set up a government. But
some form of government was absolutely necessary. Before starting from
Southampton, they had followed Robinson's instructions to choose a
governor and assistants for each ship "to order the people by the way";
and now that they were at the end of their long voyage, the men of the
company met in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, and drew up a covenant in
accordance with which they combined themselves together into a body
politic for their better ordering and preservation. This compact, signed
by forty-one members, of whom eleven bore the title of "Mister," was a
plantation covenant, the political counterpart of the church covenant
which bound together every Separatist community. It provided that the
people should live together in a peaceable and orderly manner under
civil authorities of their own choosing, and was the first of many such
covenants entered into by New England towns, not defining a government
but binding the settlers to unite politically as they had already done
for religious worship. John Carver, who had been chosen governor on the
_Mayflower_, was confirmed as governor of the settlement and given one
assistant. After their goods had been set on shore and a few cottages
built, the whole body "mette and consulted of lawes and orders, both for
their civil and military governmente, still adding therunto as urgent
occasion in severall times, and as cases did require."
Of this courageous but sorely stricken community more than half died
before the first winter was over. But gradually the people became
acclimated, new colonists came out, some from the community at Leyden,
in the _Fortune_, the _Anne_, the _Charity_, and the _Handmaid_, and the
numbers steadily increased. The settlers were in the main a homogeneous
body, both as to social class and to religious views and purpose. Among
them were undesirable members--some were sent out by the English
merchants and others came out of their own accord--who played stool-ball
on Sunday, committed theft, or set the community by the ears, as did one
notorious offender named Lyford. But their number was not great, for
most of them remained but a short time, and then went to Virginia or
elsewhere, or were shipped back to England by the Pilgrims as
incorrigibles. The life of the people was predominantly agricultural,
with fishing, salt-making, and trading with the Indians as allied
interests. The partners in England sent overseas cattle, stock, and
laborers, and, as their profits depended on the success of the
settlement, did what they could to encourage its development. The
position of the Pilgrims was that of sharers and partners with the
merchants, from whom they received directions but not commands.
But under the agreement of 1620 with their partners in London, which
remained in force for seven years, the Plymouth people could neither
divide their land nor dispose of the products of their labor, and so
burdensome became this arrangement that in 1623 temporary assignments
of land were made which in 1624 became permanent. As Bradford said, and
his comment is full of wisdom:
The experience that was had in this commone course and
condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst godly and
sober men, may well evince the vanitie of that conceite of
Platos and other ancients, applauded by some of later times;
that the taking away of propertie, and bringing in
communitie into a comone wealth, would make them happy and
florishing; as if they were wiser then God. For this
comunitie (so farr as it was) was found to breed much
confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment that
would have been to their benefite and comforte. For the
yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour and
service did repine that they should spend their time and
streingth to worke for other mens wives and children, with
out any recompence. The strong, or man of parts, had no more
in devission of victails and cloaths, than he that was weake
and not able to doe a quarter the other could; this was
thought injuestice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and
equalised in labours, and victails, cloaths, etc., with the
meaner and yonger sorte, thought it some indignitie and
disrespect unto them. And for mens wives to be commanded to
doe servise for other men, as dresing their meate, washing
their cloaths, etc., they deemd it a kind of slaverie,
neither could many husbands well brooke it.
During the two years that followed, so evident was the failure of the
joint undertaking that efforts were made on both sides to bring it to
an end; for the merchants, with no profit from the enterprise, were
anxious to avoid further indebtedness; and the colonists, wearying of
the dual control, wished to reap for themselves the full reward of their
own efforts. Under the new arrangement of small private properties, the
settlers began "to prise corne as more pretious than silver, and those
that had some to spare begane to trade one with another for small
things, by the quart, pottle, and peck, etc., for money they had none."
Later, finding "their corne, what they could spare from ther
necessities, to be a commoditie, (for they sould it at 6s. a bushell)
[they] used great dilligence in planting the same. And the Gov[erno]r
and shuch as were designed to manage the trade, (for it was retained for
the generall good, and none were to trade in particuler,) they followed
it to the best advantage they could; and wanting trading goods, they
understoode that a plantation which was at Monhigen, and belonged to
some marchants of Plimoth [England] was to breake up, and diverse
usefull goods was ther to be sould," the governor (Bradford himself) and
Edward Winslow "tooke a boat and some hands and went thither.... With
these goods, and their corne after harvest they gott good store of
trade, so as they were enabled to pay their ingagements against the
time, and to get some cloathing for the people, and had some comodities
beforehand." Though conditions were hard and often discouraging, the
Pilgrims gradually found themselves self-supporting and as soon as this
fact became clear, they sent Isaac Allerton to England "to make a
composition with the adventurers." As a result of the negotiations an
"agreement or bargen" was made whereby eight leading members of the
colony bought the shares of the merchants for £1800 and distributed the
payment among the settlers, who at this time numbered altogether about
three hundred. Each share carried with it a certain portion of land and
livestock. The debt was not finally liquidated until 1642.
By 1630, the Plymouth colony was fairly on its feet and beginning to
grow in "outward estate." The settlers increased in number, prospered
financially, and scattered to the outlying districts; and Plymouth the
town and Plymouth the colony ceased to be identical. Before 1640, the
latter had become a cluster of ten towns, each a covenanted community
with its church and elder. Though the colony never obtained a charter
of incorporation from the Crown, it developed a form of government
arising naturally from its own needs. By 1633 its governor and one
assistant had become a governor and seven assistants, elected annually
at a primary assembly held in Plymouth town; and the three parts,
governor, assistants, and assembly, together constituted the governing
body of the colony. In 1636, a revision of the laws and ordinances was
made in the form of "The Great Fundamentals," a sort of constitution,
frequently interspersed with statements of principles, which was printed
with additions in 1671. The right to vote was limited at first to those
who were members of the company and liable for its debt, but later the
suffrage was extended to include others than the first-comers, and in
1633 was exercised by sixty-eight persons altogether. In 1668, a voter
was required to have property, to be "of sober and peaceable
conversation," and to take an oath of fidelity, but apparently he was
never required to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown. So rapidly
did the colony expand that, by 1639, the holding of a primary assembly
in Plymouth town became so inconvenient that delegates had to be
chosen. Thus there was introduced into the colony a form of
representative government, though it is to be noted that governor,
assistants, and deputies sat together in a common room and never divided
into two houses, as did the assemblies in other colonies.
The settlement of Plymouth colony is conspicuous in New England history
because of the faith and courage and suffering of those who engaged in
it and because of the ever alluring charm of William Bradford's _History
of Plimouth Plantation_. The greatness of the Pilgrims lay in their
illustrious example and in the influence they exercised upon the church
life of the later New England colonies, for to the Pilgrims was due the
fact that the congregational way of organization and worship became the
accepted form in Massachusetts and Connecticut. But in other respects
Plymouth was vastly overshadowed by her vigorous neighbors. Her people,
humble and simple, were without importance in the world of thought,
literature, or education. Their intellectual and material poverty, lack
of business enterprise, unfavorable situation, and defenseless position
in the eyes of the law rendered them almost a negative factor in the
later life of New England. No great movement can be traced to their
initiation, no great leader to birth within their borders, and no great
work of art, literature, or scholarship to those who belonged to this
unpretending company. The Pilgrim Fathers stand rather as an emblem of
virtue than a moulding force in the life of the nation.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] In 1606 King James had granted a charter incorporating two
companies, one of which, made up of gentlemen and merchants in and about
London, was known as the Virginia Company of London, the other as the
Virginia Company of Plymouth. The former was authorized to plant
colonies between thirty-four and forty-one degrees north latitude, and
the latter between thirty-eight and forty-five, but neither was to plant
a colony within one hundred miles of the other. Jamestown, the first
colony of the London Company, was now thirteen years old. The Plymouth
Company had made no permanent settlement in its domain.
CHAPTER II
THE BAY COLONY
While the Pilgrims were thus establishing themselves as the first
occupants of the soil of New England, other men of various sorts and
motives were trying their fortunes within its borders and were testing
the opportunities which it offered for fishing and trade with the
Indians. They came as individuals and companies, men of wandering
disposition, romantic characters many of them, resembling the rovers and
adventurers in the Caribbean or representing some of the many activities
prevalent in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas
Weston, former ally of the Pilgrims, settled with a motley crew of rude
fellows at Wessagusset (Quincy) and there established a trading post in
1622. Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing
the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only a blockhouse and stockade
remained. Another irregular trader, Captain Wollaston, with some thirty
or forty people, chiefly servants, established himself in 1625 two miles
north of Wessagusset, calling the place Mount Wollaston. With him came
that wit, versifier, and prince of roysterers, Thomas Morton, who, after
Wollaston had moved on to Virginia, became "lord of misrule." Dubbing
his seat Merrymount, drinking, carousing, and corrupting the Indians,
affronting the decorous Separatists at Plymouth, Morton later became a
serious menace to the peace of Massachusetts Bay. The Pilgrims felt that
the coming of such adventurers and scoffers, who were none too
scrupulous in their dealings with either white man or Indian and were
given to practices which the Puritans heartily abhorred, was a calamity
showing that even in the wilds of America they could not escape the
world from which they were anxious to withdraw.
The settlements formed by these squatters and stragglers were quite
unauthorized by the New England Council, which owned the title to the
soil. As this Council had accomplished very little under its patent, Sir
Ferdinando Gorges, its most active member, persisted in his efforts to
found a colony, brought about a general distribution of the territory
among its members, and obtained for himself and his son Robert, the
section around and immediately north of Massachusetts Bay. An expedition
was at once launched. In September, 1623, Robert Gorges with six
gentlemen and a well-equipped and well-organized body of settlers
reached Plymouth,--the forerunners, it was hoped, of a large number to
come. This company of settlers was composed of families, the heads of
which were mechanics and farmers, and with them were two clergymen,
Morrell and Blackstone, the whole constituting the greatest enterprise
set on foot in America by the Council. Robert Gorges, bearing a
commission constituting him Governor-General over all New England, made
his settlement at Weston's old place at Wessagusset. Here he built
houses and stored his goods and began the founding of Weymouth, the
second permanent habitation in New England and the first on
Massachusetts Bay. Unfortunately, famine, that arch-enemy of all the
early settlers, fell upon his company, his father's resources in England
proved inadequate, and he and others were obliged to return. Of those
that remained a few stayed at Wessagusset; one of the clergymen, William
Blackstone, with his wife went to Shawmut (Boston); Samuel Maverick and
his wife, to Winnissimmet (Chelsea); and the Walfords, to Mishawum
(Charlestown). Probably all these people were Anglicans; some later
became freemen of the Massachusetts colony; others who refused to
conform returned to England; but Blackstone remained in his little
cottage on the south slope of Beacon Hill, unwilling to join any of the
churches, because, as he said, he came from England to escape the "Lord
Bishops," and he did not propose in America to be under the "Lord
Brethren."
The colony of Massachusetts Bay began as a fishing venture with profit
as its object. It so happened that the Pilgrims wished to secure a right
to fish off Cape Ann, and through one of their number they applied to
Lord Sheffield, a member of the Council who had shared in the
distribution of 1623. Sheffield caused a patent to be drawn, which the
Plymouth people conveyed to a Dorchester company desiring to establish a
fishing colony in New England. The chief promoter of the Dorchester
venture was the Reverend John White, a conforming Puritan clergyman, in
whose congregation was one John Endecott. The company thus organized
remained in England but sent some fourteen settlers to Cape Ann in the
winter of 1623-1624. Fishing and planting, however, did not go well
together, the venture failed, and the settlers removed southward to
Naumkeag (Salem). Though many of the English company desired to abandon
the undertaking, there were others, among whom were a few Puritans or
Nonconformists, who favored its continuance. These men consulted with
others of like mind in London, and through the help of the Earl of
Warwick, a nobleman friendly to the Puritan cause, a patent was issued
by the Council to Endecott and five associates, for land extending from
above the Merrimac to below the Charles. This patent, it will be
noticed, included the territory already granted to Gorges and his son
Robert, and was obtained apparently with the consent of Gorges, who
thought that his own and his son's rights would be safely protected.
Under this patent, the partners sent over Endecott as governor with
sixty others to begin a colony at Salem, where the "old planters" from
Cape Ann had already established themselves. Salem was thus a plantation
from September, 1628, to the summer of 1630, on land granted to the
associates in England; and the relations of these two were much the same
as those of Jamestown with the London Company.
Endecott and his associates soon made it evident, however, that they
were planning larger things for themselves and had no intention, if they
could help it, of recognizing the claims of Gorges and his son. They
wanted complete control of their territory in New England, and to this
end they applied to the Crown for a confirmation of their land-patent
and for a charter of incorporation as a company with full powers of
government. As this application was a deliberate defiance of Gorges and
the New England Council, it has always been a matter of surprise that
the associates were able to gain the support of the Crown in this effort
to oust Gorges and his son from lands that were legally theirs. No
satisfactory explanation has ever been advanced, but it is worthy of
note that at this juncture Gorges was in France in the service of the
King, whereas on the side of the associates and their friends was the
Earl of Warwick, himself deeply interested in colonizing projects and
one of the most powerful men in England. The charter was obtained March
4, 1629--how, we do not know. It created a corporation of twenty-six
members, Anglicans and Nonconformists, known as the Massachusetts Bay
Company.
But if the original purpose of this company was to engage in a business
enterprise for the sake of profit, it soon underwent a noteworthy
transformation. In 1629, control passed into the hands of those members
of the company in whom a religious motive was uppermost. How far the
charter was planned at first as a Puritan contrivance to be used in case
of need will never be known. It is equally uncertain whether the
particular form of charter, with the place of the company's residence
omitted, was selected to facilitate a possible removal of the company
from England to America; but it is likely that removal was early in the
minds of the Puritan members of the company. At this time a great many
people felt as did the Reverend John White, who expressed the hope that
God's people should turn with eyes of longing to the free and open
spaces of the New World, whither they might flee to be at peace. But,
when the charter was granted, the Puritans were not in control of the
company, which remained in England for a year after it was incorporated,
superintending the management of its colony just as other trading
companies had done.
But events were moving rapidly in England. Between March, 1629, and
March, 1630, Parliament was dissolved under circumstances of great
excitement, parliamentary privileges were set aside, parliamentary
leaders were sent to the Tower, and the period of royal rule without
Parliament began. The heavy hand of an autocratic government fell on all
those within reach who upheld the Puritan cause, among whom was John
Winthrop, a country squire, forty-one years of age, who was deprived of
his office as attorney in the Court of Wards. Disillusioned as to life
in England because of financial losses and family bereavements, and now
barred from his customary employment by act of the Government, he turned
his thoughts toward America. Acting with the approval of the Earl of
Warwick and in conjunction with a group of Puritan friends--Thomas
Dudley, Isaac Johnson, Richard Saltonstall, and John Humphrey,--he
decided in the summer of 1629 to leave England forever, and in September
he joined the Massachusetts Bay Company. Almost immediately he showed
his capacity for leadership, was soon elected governor, and was able
during the following winter to obtain such a control of affairs as to
secure a vote in favor of the transfer of charter and company to New
England. The official organization was remodeled so that only those
desiring to remove should be in control, and on March 29, 1630, the
company with its charter, accompanied by a considerable number of
prospective colonists, set sail from Cowes near the Isle of Wight in
four vessels, the _Arabella_, the _Talbot_, the _Ambrose_, and the
_Jewel_, the remaining passengers following in seven other vessels a
week or two later. The voyages of the vessels were long, none less than
nine weeks, by way of the Azores and the Maine coast, and the distressed
Puritans, seven hundred altogether, scurvy-stricken and reduced in
numbers by many deaths, did not reach Salem until June and July. Hence
they moved on to Charlestown, set up their tents on the slope of the
hill, and on the 23rd of August, held the first official meeting of the
company on American soil; but finding no running water in the place and
still pursued by sickness and death, they again removed, this time to
Boston, where they built houses against the winter. With the founding of
this colony--the colony of Massachusetts Bay--a new era for New England
began.
This grant of territory to the Massachusetts Bay Company and of the
charter confirming the title and conveying powers of government put a
complete stop to Gorges's plans for a final proprietorship in New
England. Gorges had acquiesced in the first grant by the New England
Council because he thought it a sub-grant, like that to Plymouth, in no
way injuring his own control. But when in 1632, he learned the true
inwardness of the Massachusetts title and discovered that Warwick and
the Puritans had outwitted him by obtaining royal confirmation of a
grant that extinguished his own proprietary rights, he turned on
Warwick, declared that the charter had been surreptitiously obtained,
and demanded that it be brought to the Council board. Learning that it
had gone to New England, he forced the withdrawal of Warwick from the
Council, and from that time forward for five years bent all his efforts
to overthrow the Puritan colony by obtaining the annulment of its
privileges.
In this attempt, he was aided by Captain John Mason, an able, energetic
promoter of colonizing movements who had already been concerned with
settlements in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and who was zealous to
begin a plantation in the province of Maine. Mason had received grants
from the Council, both individually and in partnership with Gorges, and
had visited New England in the interest of his claims. Through the
influence of Gorges, he was now made a member of the Council and joined
in the movement to break the hold of the Puritans upon New England. He
and Gorges found useful allies in three men who had been driven out of
Massachusetts by the Puritan leaders soon after their arrival at
Boston--Thomas Morton of Merrymount, Sir Christopher Gardiner, a
picturesque, somewhat mysterious personage thought to have been an agent
of Gorges in New England, with methods and morals that gave offense to
Massachusetts, and Philip Ratcliffe, a much less worthy character given
to scandal and invective, who had been deprived of his ears by the
Puritan authorities. These men were bitter in their denunciation of the
Puritan government.
The situation was perilous for the new colony, which was hardly yet
firmly established. In direct violation of the royal commands, hundreds
of men and women were leaving England--not merely adventurers or humble
Separatists, but sober people of the better classes, of mature years and
substantial characters. When, therefore, Gorges and the others meeting
at Gorges's house at Plymouth brought their complaints to the attention
of the Privy Council, they were listened to with attention, and
instructions were sent at once to stop the Puritan ships and to bring
the charter of the Massachusetts Company to the Council board. To check
the Puritan migration and to institute further inquiry into the facts of
the case a commission was appointed in 1634, with Archbishop Laud at its
head, for the special purpose, among others, of revoking charters
"surreptitiously and unduly obtained." Gorges and Morton appealed to
Laud against the Puritans, and Morton wrote his _New England Canaan_,
which he dedicated to Laud, in the hope of exposing the motives of the
colony and of arousing the Archbishop to action. Warwick threw his
influence on the side of Massachusetts, being always forward, as
Winthrop said, "to do good to our colony"; and the colony itself,
fearing attack, began to fortify Castle Island in the harbor and to
prepare for defense. Endecott, in wrath, defaced the royal ensign at
Salem, and so intense was the excitement and so determined the attitude
of the Puritans that, had the Crown attempted to send over a
Governor-General or to seize the charter by force, the colony would have
resisted to the full extent of its power.
Gorges, believing that he could work better through the King and the
Archbishop than through the New England Council, brought about the
dissolution of that body in 1635, thus making it possible for the King
to deal directly with the New England situation. Before its dissolution
the Council had authorized Morton, acting as its lawyer, to bring the
case to the attention of the Attorney-General of England, who filed in
the Court of King's Bench a complaint against Massachusetts, as a result
of which a writ of _quo warranto_ was issued against the Company.
The outlook was ominous for Puritanism, not only in New England but in
old England as well. That year saw the flight of the greatest number of
emigrants across the sea, for the persecution in England was at its
height, the Puritan aristocracy was suffering in its estates, and
Puritan divines were everywhere silenced or dismissed. Even Warwick was
shorn of a part of his power. Young Henry Vane, son of a baronet, had
already gone to America, and such men as Lord Saye and Sele, Lord
Brooke, and Sir Arthur Haslerigg were thinking of migrating and had
prepared a refuge at Saybrook where they might find peace. But the turn
of the tide soon came. The royal Government was bankrupt, the resistance
to the payment of ship-money was already making itself felt, and
disturbances in the central and eastern counties were absorbing the
attention and energies of the Government. Gorges, left alone to execute
the writ against the colony, joined with Mason in building a ship for
the purpose of carrying the _quo warranto_ to New England, but the
vessel broke in the launching, and their resources were at an end. Mason
died in 1635, and Gorges, an old man of seventy, bankrupt and
discouraged, could do no more. Though Morton continued the struggle, and
though, in 1638, the Committee of the Council for Foreign Plantations
(the Laud Commission) again demanded the charter, the danger was past:
conditions in England had become so serious for the King that the
complaints against Massachusetts were lost to view. At last in 1639
Gorges obtained his charter for a feudal propriety in Maine but no
further attempts were made to overthrow the Massachusetts Bay colony.
During the years from 1630 to 1640, the growth of the colony was
extraordinarily rapid. In the first year alone seventeen ships with
two thousand colonists came over, and it is estimated that by 1641
three hundred vessels bearing twenty thousand passengers had crossed
the Atlantic. It was a great migration. Inevitably many went back,
but the great majority remained and settled in Boston and its
neighborhood--Roxbury, Charlestown, Dorchester, Cambridge, and
Watertown, where in 1643 were situated according to Winthrop "near half
of the commonwealth for number of people and substance." From the first
the colonists dispersed rapidly, establishing in favorable places
settlements which they generally called plantations but sometimes towns.
In these they lived as petty religious and civil communities, each under
its minister, with civil officials chosen from among themselves. In the
decade following 1630 the number of such settlements rose to twenty-two.
The inhabitants were almost purely English in stock, with here and there
an Irishman, a few Jews, and an occasional negro from the West Indies.
Nearly all the settlers were of Puritan sympathies, and of middle-class
origin--tenants from English estates, artisans from English towns, and
many indentured servants. A few were of the aristocracy, such as Lady
Arabella Johnson, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Richard
Saltonstall, Lady Deborah Moody, members of the Harlakenden family,
young Henry Vane, Thomas Gorges, and a few others. Of "Misters" and
"Esquires" there was a goodly number, such as Winthrop, Haynes, Emanuel
Downing, and the like. The first leaders were exceptional men,
possessed of ability and education, and many were university graduates,
who brought with them the books and the habits of the reader and scholar
of their day. They were superior to those of the second and third
generation in the breadth of their ideas and in the vigor and
originality of their convictions.
Migration ceased in 1641, and a time of stress and suffering set in.
Commodities grew scarce, prices rose, many colonists returned to England
leaving debts behind, and as yet the colony produced no staples to
exchange for merchandise from the mother country. Some of the settlers,
discouraged, went to the West Indies; others, fleeing for fear of want,
found their way to the Dutch at Long Island. Pressure was brought to
bear at various times to persuade the people to migrate elsewhere as a
body, to Old Providence and Trinidad in the Caribbean, to Maryland, and
later to Jamaica; but these attempts proved vain. The Puritan was
willing to endure hardship and suffering for the sake of civil and
religious independence, but he was not willing to lose his identity
among those who did not share his faith in the guiding hand of God or
who denied the principles according to which he wished to govern his
community. At first the leaders of the migration were Nonconformists not
Separatists. Francis Higginson, Endecott's minister at Salem, had
declared in 1629 that they did not go to New England as separatists from
the Church of England but only as those who would "separate from the
corruption in it"; and Winthrop used "Easter" and the customary names of
the months until 1635. But the Puritans became essentially Separatists
from the day when Dr. Samuel Fuller of Plymouth persuaded the Salem
community, even before the company itself had left England, to accept
the practices of the Plymouth Church. Each town consequently had its
church, pastor, teacher, and covenant, and became an independent
Congregational community--a circumstance which left a deep impress upon
the life and history of New England.
The government of the colony was never a democracy in the modern sense
of the term. At first in 1630, control was assumed by the governor and
his assistants, leaving but little power in the hands of the freeman;
but such usurpation of power could not last, and in 1634 the freemen
were given the right to elect officials, to make and enforce laws,
raise money, impose taxes, and dispose of lands. Thus was begun the
transformation of the court of the company into a parliament, and the
company itself into a commonwealth. So self-sufficient did the colony
become in these early years of its history that by 1646 Massachusetts
could assert that it owed only allegiance to England and was entirely
independent of the British Parliament in all matters of government, in
which affairs under its charter it had absolute power. Many denied this
contention of the leaders, asserting that the company was only a
corporation and that any colonist had a right of appeal to England.
Winthrop refused definitely to recognize this right, and measures were
taken to purge the colony of these refractory spirits, among whom were
Dr. Robert Child, one of the best educated men of the colony, William
Vassall, and Samuel Maverick. All were fined, some clapped in irons, and
many banished. Child returned to England, Vassall went to Barbados, and
the rest were silenced. So menacing was the revolt that Edward Winslow
was sent to England to present the case to the parliamentary
commissioners, which he did successfully.
But among those who upheld the freedom of the colony from English
interference and control there were many who complained of the form the
government was taking. The franchise was limited to church members,
which debarred five-sixths of the population from voting and holding
office; the magistrates insisted on exercising a negative vote upon the
proceedings of the deputies, because they deemed it necessary to prevent
the colony from degenerating into "a mere democracy"; and the ministers
or elders exercised an influence in purely civil matters that rendered
them arbiters in all disputes between the magistrates and the deputies.
Until 1634, the general court had been a primary assembly, but in that
year representation was introduced and the towns sent deputies, who soon
began to complain of the meagerness of their powers. From this time on,
the efforts of the deputies to reduce the authority of the magistrates
and to increase their own were continuous and insistent. One bold
dissenter was barred from public office in 1635 for daring to deny the
magistrates' claim, and others expressed their fear that autocratic rule
and a governor for life would endanger the liberty of the people. The
dominance of the clergy tended to the maintenance of an intolerant
theocracy and was offensive to many in Massachusetts who, having fled
from Laud's intolerance at home, had no desire to submit to an equal
intolerance in New England. Between 1634 and 1638 the manifestations of
this dislike became conspicuous and alarming. The Governor's son, the
younger John Winthrop, dissatisfied with the hard régime in
Massachusetts, returned to England in 1634. Henry Vane, though elected
Governor in 1636, showed marked discontent, and when defeated the next
year left the colony. The English aristocratic Puritans, Saye and Sele,
Brooke, and others, who planned to leave England in 1635, found
themselves so out of accord with the Massachusetts policy of limiting of
the suffrage to church members--and to church membership as determined
by the clergy--that they refused to go to Boston, and persisted in their
plan for a settlement at Saybrook. The Massachusetts system had thus
become not a constitutional government fashioned after the best liberal
thought in England of that day, but a narrow oligarchy in which the
political order was determined according to a rigid interpretation of
theology. This excessive theocratic concentration of power resulted in
driving from the colony many of its best men.
More notorious even than the political dissensions were the moral and
theological disputes which almost disrupted the colony. The magistrates
and elders did not compel men to leave the colony because of political
heresy, but they did drive them out because of difference in matters of
theology. Even before the company came over, Endecott had sent John and
Samuel Browne back to England because they worshiped according to the
Book of Common Prayer. Morton and six others were banished in 1630 as an
immoral influence. Sir Christopher Gardiner, Philip Ratcliffe, Richard
Wright, the Walfords, and Henry Lynn were all forced to leave in 1630
and 1631 as "unmeete to inhabit here." Roger Williams, the tolerationist
and upholder of soul-liberty, who complained of the magistrates for
oppression and of the elders for injustice and who opposed the close
union of church and state, was compelled to leave during the winter of
1635 and 1636. But the great expulsion came in 1637, when an epidemic of
heresy struck the colony. A synod at Newtown condemned eighty erroneous
opinions, and the general court then disarmed or banished all who
persisted in error.
A furor of excitement gathered about Anne Hutchinson, who claimed to be
moved by the spirit and denied that an outward conformity to the letter
of the covenant was a sufficient test of true religion unless
accompanied with a change in the inner life. She was a nonconformist
among those who, refusing to conform to the Church of England, had now
themselves become conformists of the strictest type. To Mrs. Hutchinson
the "vexatious legalism of Puritanism" was as abhorrent as had been the
practices of the Roman and Anglican churches to the Puritans, and,
though the latter did not realize it, they were as unjust to her as Laud
had been to them. She broke from a covenant of works in favor of a
covenant of grace and in so doing defied the standing authorities and
the ruling clergy of the colony. Her wit, undeniable power of
exhortation, philanthropic disposition, and personal attributes which
gave her an ascendency in the Boston church, drew to her a large
following and placed the supremacy of the orthodox party in peril. After
a long and wordy struggle to check the "misgovernment of a woman's
tongue" and to rebuke "the impudent boldness of a proud dame," Mrs.
Hutchinson was excommunicated and banished; and certain of those who
upheld her--Wheelwright, Coggeshall, Aspinwall, Coddington, and
Underhill, all leading men of the colony--were also forced to leave. In
Boston and the adjoining towns dozens of men were disarmed for fear of a
general uprising against the orthodox government.
This discord put a terrible strain on the colony, and one marvels that
it weathered the storm. Only an iron discipline that knew neither
charity nor tolerance could have successfully resisted the attacks on
the standing order. The years from 1635 to 1638 were a critical time in
the history of the colony, and the unyielding attitude of magistrates
and elders was due in no small part to the danger of attack from
England. Determined, on the one hand, to save the colony from the menace
of Anglican control, and, on the other, to prevent the admission of
liberal and democratic ideas, they struggled to maintain the rule of a
minority in behalf of a precise and logically defined theocratic system
that admitted neither experiment nor compromise. For the moment they
were successful, because the Cromwellian victory in England was
favorable to their cause. But should independence be overthrown at home,
should religion cease to be a deciding factor in political quarrels, and
should the monarchy and the Established Church gain ascendency once
more, then Massachusetts would certainly reap the whirlwind. The
harvesting might be long but the garnering would be none the less sure.
CHAPTER III
COMPLETING THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT
Through the portal of Boston at one time or another passed all or nearly
all those who were to found additional colonies in New England; and from
that portal, willingly or unwillingly, men and women journeyed north,
south, and west, searching for favorable locations, buying land of the
Indians, and laying the groundwork for permanent homes and organized
communities. In this way were begun the colonies of Rhode Island,
Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire, each of which sprang in part
from the desire for separate religious and political life and in part
from the migratory instinct which has always characterized the
Englishman in his effort to find a home and a means of livelihood.
Sometimes individuals wandered alone or in groups of two or three, but
more frequently covenanted companies of men and women of like minds
moved across the face of the land, followed Indian trails, or voyaged
by water along the coast and up the rivers, usually remaining where they
first found satisfaction, but often, in new combinations, taking up the
burden of their journeying and moving on, a second, a third, and even a
fourth time in search of homes. Abraham Pierson and his flock migrated
four times in thirty years, seeking a place where they might find rest
under a government according to God.
The frontier Puritan was neither docile nor easily satisfied. He was
restless, opinionated, and eager to assert himself and his convictions.
The controversies among the elect regarding doctrines and morals often
became so heated that complete separation was the only remedy; and
wherever there was a migrating leader followers were sure to be found.
Hence, despite the dangers from cold, famine, the Indian, and the
wilderness, the men of New England were constantly shifting in these
earlier years as one motive or another urged them on. Land was
plentiful, and, as a rule, easily obtained; opportunities for trade
presented themselves to any one who would seek them; and the freedom of
earth and sky and of nature unspoiled offered an ideal environment for
a closer communion with God. Owing to the many varieties of religious
opinion that prevailed among these radical pioneers, each new grouping
and consequent settlement had an individuality of its own, determined by
the personality of its leader and by the ideas that he represented. Thus
Williams, Clarke, Coddington, and Gorton influenced Rhode Island;
Hooker, Haynes, and Ludlow, Connecticut; Davenport, Eaton, and Pierson,
New Haven; and Wheelwright and Underhill, New Hampshire.
Roger Williams, the founder of Providence--the first plantation to be
settled in what was later the colony of Rhode Island--was driven out of
Boston because he called in question the authority of the government,
denied the legality of its land title as derived from the King, and
contested the right of the magistrates to deal with matters
ecclesiastical. Making his way through the wilderness in the winter of
1635-1636, he finally settled on the Mooshassuc River, calling the place
Providence; and in the ensuing two years he gathered about him a number
of those who found the church system of Massachusetts intolerable and
the Erastian doctrines of the magistrates, according to which the sins
of believers were to be punished by civil authority, distressing to
their consciences. They drew up a plantation covenant, promising to
subject themselves "in active or passive obedience to all such orders or
agreements" as might be made for the public good in an orderly way by
the majority vote of the masters of families, "incorporated together
into a town fellowship," but "only in civill things." Thus did the men
of Providence put into practice their doctrine of a church separable
from the state, and of a political order in which there were no
magistrates, no elders exercising civil as well as spiritual authority,
and no restraint on soul liberty.
A year or two later William Coddington, loyal ally of Anne Hutchinson,
with others--Clarke, Coggeshall, and Aspinwall, who resented the
aggressive attitude of Boston--purchased from the Indians the island of
Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay and at the northern end planted Pocasset,
afterwards Portsmouth, the second settlement in the colony of Rhode
Island. They, too, entered into a covenant to join themselves into a
body politic and elected Coddington as their judge and five others as
elders. But this modeling of the government after the practices of the
Old Testament was not pleasing to a majority of the community, which
desired a more democratic organization. After a few months, in the
spring of 1639, Coddington and his followers therefore journeyed
southward and established a third settlement at Newport. Here the
members adopted a covenant, "engaging" themselves "to bear equall
charges, answerable to our strength and estates in common," and to be
governed "by major voice of judge and elders; the judge to have a double
voice." Though differing from the system as developed in Massachusetts,
the Newport government at the beginning had a decidedly theocratic
character.
The last of the Rhode Island settlements was at Shawomet, or Warwick, on
the western mainland at the upper end of the Bay. There Samuel Gorton,
the mystic and transcendentalist, one of the most individual of men in
an era of striking individualities, after many vicissitudes found an
abiding place. He was of London, "a clothier and professor of the
misteries of Christ," a believer in established authority as the surest
guardian of liberty, and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties.
Arriving at Boston in 1637 at the height of the Hutchinsonian
controversy, he had sought liberty of conscience, first in Boston, then
in Plymouth, and finally in Portsmouth, where he had become a leader
after the withdrawal of Coddington. But in each place his instinct for
justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts
rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a
home that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, however, was
he settled at Shawomet, than the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to
the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow
escape from the death penalty, followed by a journey to England and the
enlisting of the sympathies of the Earl of Warwick, that he made good
his claim. Gorton returned in 1648 with a letter from Warwick, as Lord
Admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs,
ordering Massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people, and he
named the plantation Warwick after his patron.
Samuel Gorton played an influential and useful part in the later history
of the colony, and his career of peaceful service to Rhode Island belies
the opinion, based on Winslow's partisan pamphlet, _Hypocrasie
Unmasked_, and other contemporary writings, that he was a blasphemer, a
"crude and half-crazy thinker," a "proud and pestilent seducer," and a
"most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties." He preferred "the
universitie of humane reason and reading of the volume of visible
creation" to sectarianism and convention. No wonder the Massachusetts
leaders could not comprehend him! He questioned their infallibility,
their ecclesiastical caste, and their theology, and for their own
self-preservation they were bound to resist what they deemed his
heresies.
Thus Rhode Island at the beginning was formed of four separate and
independent communities, each in embryo a petty state, no one of which
possessed at first other than an Indian title for its lands and a
self-made plantation covenant as the warrant for its government. To
settle disputes over land titles and to dispose of town lands,
Providence established in 1640 a court of arbitration consisting of five
"disposers," who seem also to have served as a sort of executive board
for the town. In all outward relations she remained isolated from her
neighbors, pursuing a course of strictly local independence. Portsmouth
and Newport, for the sake of greater strength, united in March, 1640,
and a year later agreed on a form of government which they called "a
democratic or popular government," in which none was to be "accounted a
delinquent for doctrine." They set up a governor, deputy governor, and
four assistants, regularly elected, and provided that all laws should be
made by the freemen or the major part of them, "orderly assembled." In
the system thus established we can see the influence of the older
colonies and the beginning of a stronger government, but at best the
experiment was half-hearted, for each town reserved to itself complete
control over its own affairs. In 1647 Portsmouth withdrew "to be as free
in their transactions as any other town in the colony," and the spirit
of separatism was still dominant.
But it soon became necessary for the four towns of what is now Rhode
Island to have something more legal upon which to base their right to
exist than a title derived from their plantation covenants and Indian
bargains. Massachusetts was extending her claims southward; Edward
Winslow was in England ready to show that the Rhode Island settlements
were within the bounds of the Plymouth patent; and certain individuals,
traders and land-seekers, were locating in the Narragansett country and
taking possession of the soil. To combat these claims, Roger Williams,
who had so vehemently denied the validity of a royal patent a few years
before, but influenced now, it may be, by Gorton's insistence that a
legal title could be obtained only from England, sailed overseas and
secured from the parliamentary commissioners in March, 1644, a charter
uniting Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport, under the name of
Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay, and granting them powers
of government. For the moment even this document had no certain value,
for, in spite of the fact that the parliamentarians were at war with the
King, Charles I was still sovereign of England and should he win in the
Civil War the title would be worthless. However, the patent was not put
in force until 1647, after the victory of Cromwell at Naseby had given
control into the hands of Parliament; and then a general meeting was
held at Portsmouth consisting of the freemen of Warwick, Portsmouth, and
Newport, and ten representatives from Providence. The patent did not
state how affairs were to be managed, and the colonials, meeting in
subsequent assemblies, worked out the problem in their own way. They
refused to have a governor, and, creating only a presiding officer with
four assistants, constituted a court of trials for the hearing of
important criminal and civil causes. No general court was created by
law, but a legislative body soon came into existence consisting of six
deputies from each town. Before this Portsmouth meeting of 1647
adjourned, it adopted a code of laws in which witchcraft trials and
imprisonment for debt were forbidden, capital punishment was largely
abolished, and divorce was granted for adultery only. In 1652, the
assembly passed a noteworthy law against the holding of negroes in
slavery.
But the new patent did not bring peace to the colony. In 1649, Roger
Williams wrote to Governor Winthrop: "Our poor colony is in civil
dissension. Their last meeting [of the assembly] at which I have not
been, have fallen into factions. Mr. Coddington and Captain Partridge,
etc., are the heads of one, and Captain Clarke, Mr. Easton, etc., the
heads of the other." What had happened was this. Coddington,
representing the conservative and theocratic wing of the assembly and
opposing those who were more liberally minded, had evidently applied to
Massachusetts and Plymouth for support in the effort to obtain an
independent government for Aquidneck. This plan would have destroyed
what unity the colony had obtained under the patent, but Coddington
wished to be governor of a colony of his own. Both Massachusetts and
Plymouth were favorable to this plan, as they hoped to further their own
claims to the territory of islands and mainland. Twice Coddington made
application to the newly formed Confederation of New England for
admission, but was refused unless he would bring in Aquidneck as part of
Massachusetts or Plymouth, the latter of which laid claim to it.
Coddington himself was willing to do this but found the opposition to
the plan so vehement that he gave up the attempt and went to England to
secure a patent of his own. After long negotiations he was successful in
his quest and returned with a document which appointed him governor for
life with almost viceregal powers. But he had reckoned without the
people whom he was to govern. Learning of the outcome of Coddington's
mission and hearing that he had had secret dealings also with the Dutch
at New Amsterdam, the inhabitants of the islands rose in revolt, hanged
Captain Partridge and compelled Coddington to seek safety in flight.
Williams again went to England in 1651 and procured the recall of
Coddington's commission and a confirmation of his own patent, and
Coddington in 1656 gave in his submission and was forgiven. The early
history of Rhode Island thus furnishes a remarkable exhibition of
intense individualism in things religious and a warring of disruptive
forces in matters of civil organization.
Connecticut was settled during the years 1634 to 1636 by people from
Massachusetts. Knowledge of the fertile Connecticut valley had come
early to the Dutch, who had planted a blockhouse, the House of Good
Hope, at the southeast corner of the land upon which Hartford now
stands. Plymouth, too, in searching for advantageous trade openings had
sent out one William Holmes, who sailed past the Dutch fort and took
possession of the site of Windsor. In the autumn of 1634 a certain John
Oldham, trader and rover and frequent disturber of the Puritan peace,
came with a few companions and began to occupy and cultivate lands
within the bounds of modern Wethersfield. Settlers continued to arrive
from Massachusetts, either by land or by water, actuated by land-hunger
and stirred to movement westward by the same driving impulse that for
years to come was to populate the frontier wherever it stretched. The
territory thus possessed was claimed at first by Massachusetts, on the
theory that the southern line of the colony, if extended westward,
would include this portion of the Connecticut River. It was also claimed
by the group of English lords and gentlemen, Saye and Sele, Brooke, and
other Puritans, who, as they supposed, had obtained through the Earl of
Warwick from the New England Council a grant of land extending west and
southwest from Narragansett Bay forty leagues. These claims were of
course irreconcilable, but the English lords, in order to assert their
title, sent over in 1635 twenty servants, known as the Stiles party, who
reached Connecticut in the summer of that year. Thus by autumn there
were on the ground four sets of rival claimants: the Dutch, the Plymouth
traders, various emigrants from Massachusetts, chiefly from the town of
Dorchester, and the Stiles party, representing the English lords and
gentlemen. Their relations were not harmonious, for the Dutch tried to
drive out the Plymouth traders, and the latter resented in their turn
the attempt of the Dorchester men to occupy their lands.
The matter was to be settled not by force but by weight of numbers and
soundness of title. In 1635, a new and larger migration was under
consideration in Massachusetts, prompted by various motives: partly
personal, as shown in the rivalries of strong men in a colony already
overstocked with leaders; partly material, as indicated by the desire
for wider fields for cultivation and especially good pasture; and partly
political, as evidenced by the dislike on the part of many for the power
of the elders and magistrates in Massachusetts and by the strong
inclination of masterful men toward a government of their own. Thomas
Hooker, the pastor of the Newtown church, John Haynes, the Governor of
Massachusetts in 1635, and Roger Ludlow, a former magistrate and deputy
governor who had failed of election to the magistracy in the same year,
were the leaders of the movement and, if we may judge from later events,
were believers in certain political ideas that were not finding
application in the Bay Colony. Disappointed because of the rigidity of
the Massachusetts system, they seem to have waited for an opportunity to
put into practice the principles which they believed essential to the
true government of a people.
When the decision was finally reached and certain of the inhabitants of
Newtown, Watertown, and Roxbury were ready to enter on their removal,
the question naturally arose as to the title to the territory. In June,
1635, Massachusetts had asserted her claim by exercising a sort of
supervision over those who had already gone to Connecticut; but in
October John Winthrop, Jr., the Reverend Hugh Peters, and Henry Vane
arrived from England with authority from the lords and gentlemen to push
their claim, and Winthrop actually bore a commission as governor of the
entire territory, which included Connecticut. It is hardly possible that
Hooker and Haynes would have ignored the demands of these agents, and
yet to acknowledge Winthrop as their governor would have been to accept
a head who was not of their own choosing. In all probability some
arrangement was made with Winthrop, according to which the Englishmen's
title to the lands was recognized but at the same time the Connecticut
settlers were to have full powers of self-government, and the question
of a governor was left for the moment undecided, Winthrop confining his
jurisdiction to Saybrook, the settlement which he was to promote at the
mouth of the river. This agreement was embodied in a commission which
was drawn up by the Massachusetts General Court and issued in March,
1636, "on behalf of our said members and John Winthrop, Jr.," and was
to last for one year. Who actually wrote this commission we do not know,
but the Connecticut men said afterwards that it arose from the desire of
the people who removed, because they did not want to go away without a
frame of government agreed on beforehand and did not want to recognize
"any claymes of the Massachusetts jurisdiction over them by vertew of
Patent." Apparently the people going to Connecticut wanted to get as far
away from Massachusetts as possible.
Armed with their commission, in the summer of 1636, members of the
Newtown church to the number of about one hundred persons, led by Thomas
Hooker, their pastor, and Samuel Stone, his assistant, made a famous
pilgrimage under summer skies through the woods that lay between
Massachusetts and the Connecticut River. Bearing Mrs. Hooker in a litter
and driving their cattle before them, these courageous pioneers, men,
women, and children, after a fortnight's journeying, reached Hartford,
the site of their future home, already occupied by those who had
foregathered there in number larger even than those who had newly
arrived. At about the same time, William Pynchon and others of Roxbury,
acting from similar motives, took the same course westward, but instead
of continuing down the Connecticut River, as the others had done,
stopped at its banks and made their settlement at Agawam (Springfield),
where they built a warehouse and a wharf for use in trade with the
Indians. The lower settlements, Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor,
became agricultural communities; but Springfield, standing at the
junction of Indian trails and river communication, was destined to
become the center of the beaver trade of the region, shipping furs and
receiving commodities through Boston, either in shallops around the Cape
or on pack-horses overland by the path the emigrants had trod. Pynchon's
settlement was one of the towns named in the commission and, for the
first year after it was founded, joined with the others in maintaining
order in the colony.
The commission government came to an end in March, 1637, and there is
reason to think that during the last month, an election of committees
took place in Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, which would show that
the Connecticut settlers were exercising the privilege of the franchise
more than a year before Hooker preached his famous sermon declaring that
the right of government lay in the people. There also is some reason to
think that the leaders were still undecided whether or not to come to an
agreement with the English lords and gentlemen and to put themselves
under the latter's jurisdiction. But as Winthrop's commission expired at
the end of a year and no new governor was appointed--the English
Puritans having become absorbed in affairs at home--the Connecticut
colony was thrown on its own resources and compelled to set up a
government of its own. Pynchon at Springfield now cast in his lot with
Massachusetts, and from this time forward Springfield was a part of the
Massachusetts colony, but the men of Connecticut, disliking Pynchon's
desertion, determined to act for themselves. On May 31, 1638, Hooker
preached a sermon laying down the principles according to which
government should be established; and during the six months that
followed, the court, consisting of six magistrates and nine deputies,
framed the Fundamental Orders, the laws that were to govern the colony.
This remarkable document, though deserving all the encomiums passed upon
it, was not a constitution in any modern sense of the word and
established nothing fundamentally new, because the form of government
it outlined differed only in certain particulars from that of
Massachusetts and Plymouth. It was made up of two parts, a preamble,
which is a plantation covenant like that signed in the cabin of the
_Mayflower_, and a series of laws or orders passed either separately or
together by the court which drafted them. This court was a lawmaking
body and it made public the laws when they were passed. That this body
of laws or, as we may not improperly call it, this frame of government
was ratified, as Trumbull says, by all the free planters assembled at
Hartford on January 14, 1639, is not impossible, though such action
would seem unnecessary as the court was a representative body, and
unlikely as the time of year was not favorable for holding a
mass-meeting at Hartford. Later courts never hesitated to change the
articles without referring the changes to the planters. The articles
simply confirmed the system of magistrates and deputies already in
existence and added provisions for the election of a governor and deputy
governor--who had not hitherto been chosen because of doubts regarding
the jurisdiction of the English lords and gentlemen.
In matters of detail the Connecticut system differed from that of
Massachusetts in three particulars: it imposed no religious test for
those entitled to vote, but required only that the governor be a church
member, though it is probable that in practice only those would be
admitted freemen who were covenanted Christians; it gave less power to
the magistrates and more to the freemen; and it placed the election of
the governor in the hands of the voters, limiting their choice only to a
church member and a former magistrate, and forbidding reëlection until
after the expiration of a year. Later the qualifications of a freeman
were made such that only about one in every two or three voted in the
seventeenth century; the powers of the magistrates were increased; and
the governor was allowed to succeed himself. Connecticut was less
democratic than Rhode Island in the seventeenth century and, as the
years went on, fewer and fewer of the inhabitants exercised the
freeman's privilege of voting for the higher officials. By no stretch of
the imagination can the political conditions in any of the New England
colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of
a very few men.
Two more settlements remain to be considered before a survey of the
foundations of New England can be called complete. When the Reverend
John Wheelwright, the friend of Anne Hutchinson, was driven from
Massachusetts and took his way northward to the region of Squamscott
Falls where he founded Exeter, he entered a territory of grants and
claims and rights of possession that render the early history of New
Hampshire a tangle of difficulties. Out of a grant to Gorges and Mason
of the stretch of coast between the Merrimac and the Kennebec in 1622,
and a confirmation of Mason's right to the region between the Merrimac
and the Piscataqua, arose the settlement of Strawberry Bank, or
Portsmouth, and accompanying it a controversy over the title to the soil
that lasted throughout the colonial period. Mason called his territory
New Hampshire; Gorges planned to call the region that he received New
Somersetshire; and both designations took root, one as the name of a
colony, the other as that of a county in Maine. At an earlier date,
merchants of Bristol and Shrewsbury had become interested in this part
of New England and had sent over one Edward Hilton, who some time before
1627 began a settlement at Dover. The share of the Bristol merchants was
purchased in 1633 by the English lords and gentlemen already concerned
in the Connecticut settlement, for the purpose, it may be, of furnishing
another refuge in New England, should conditions at home demand their
withdrawal overseas. But nothing came of their purchase except an
unfortunate controversy with Plymouth colony over trading boundaries on
the Kennebec.
The men established on this northern frontier were often lawless and
difficult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their
own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and
settled government. Yet out of these somewhat nebulous beginnings, four
settlements arose--Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican
and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil
compact and each an independent town. The inhabitants were few in
number, and "the generality, of mean and low estates," and little
disposed to union among themselves. But in 1638-1639, when Massachusetts
discovered that one interpretation of her charter would carry her
northern boundary to a point above them, she took them under her
protecting wing. After considerable debate this jurisdiction was
recognized and the New Hampshire and Maine towns were brought within
her boundaries. Henceforth, for many years a number of these towns,
though in part Anglican communities and never burdened with the
requirement that their freemen be church members, were represented in
the general court at Boston. Nevertheless the Mason and Gorges
adherents--whose Anglican and pro-monarchical sympathies were hostile to
Puritan control and who were supported by the persistent efforts of the
Mason family in England--were able to obtain the separation of New
Hampshire from Massachusetts in 1678. Maine, however, remained a part of
the Bay Colony to the end of the colonial period.
The circumstances attending the settlement of New Haven were wholly
unlike those of New Hampshire. John Davenport, a London clergyman of an
extreme Puritan type, Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant in the Baltic
trade and a member of the Eastland Company, Samuel Eaton and John
Lathrop, two nonconforming ministers, were the leaders of the movement.
Lathrop never went to New Haven, and Samuel Eaton early returned to
England. The leaders and many of their followers were men of
considerable property for that day, and their interest in trade gave to
the colony a marked commercial character. The company was composed of
men and women from London and its vicinity, and of others who joined
them from Kent, Hereford, and Yorkshire. As both Davenport and
Theophilus Eaton were members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, they
were familiar with its work; and on coming to America in June, 1637,
they stopped at Boston and remained there during the winter. Pressure
was brought upon them to make Massachusetts their home, but without
success, for though Davenport had much in common with the Massachusetts
people, he was not content to remain where he would be merely one among
many. Desiring a free place for worship and trade, he sent Eaton
voyaging to find one; and the latter, who had heard of Quinnipiac on the
Connecticut shore, viewed this spot and reported favorably. In March,
1638, the company set sail from Boston and laid the foundations of the
town of New Haven.
This company had neither charter nor land grant, and, as far as we know,
it had made no attempt to obtain either. "The first planters," says
Kingsley, "recognized in their acts no human authority foreign to
themselves." Unlike the Pilgrims in their _Mayflower_ compact, they made
no reference in their plantation covenant to the dread sovereign, King
James, and in none of their acts and statements did they express a
longing for their native country or regard for its authority. Their
settlement bears some resemblance to that of the Rhode Island towns, but
it was better organized and more orderly from the beginning. The
settlers may have drawn up their covenant before leaving Boston and may
have reached Quinnipiac as a community already united in a common civil
and religious bond. Their lands, which they purchased from the Indians,
they laid out in their own way. The next year on June 4, 1639, they held
a meeting in Robert Newman's barn and there, declaring that the Word of
God should be their guide in families and commonwealth and that only
church members should be sharers in government, they chose twelve men as
the foundations of their church state. Two months later these twelve
selected "seven pillars" who proceeded to organize a church by
associating others with themselves. Under the leadership of the seven
the government continued until October, when they resigned and a
gathering of the church members elected Theophilus Eaton as their
magistrate and four others to act as assistants, with a secretary and a
treasurer. Thus was begun a form of government which when perfected was
very similar to that of the other New England colonies.
While New Haven as a town-colony was taking on form, other plantations
were arising near by. Milford was settled partly from New Haven and
partly from Wethersfield, where an overplus of clergy was leading to
disputes and many withdrawals to other parts. Guilford was settled
directly from England. Southold on Long Island was settled also from
England, by way of New Haven. Stamford had its origin in a Wethersfield
quarrel, when the Reverend Richard Denton, "blind of one eye but not the
least among the seers of Israel," departed with his flock. Branford also
was born of a Wethersfield controversy and later received accessions
from Long Island. In 1643, Milford, Guilford, and Stamford combined
under the common jurisdiction of New Haven, to which Southold and
Branford acceded later with a form of government copied after that of
Massachusetts, though the colony was distinctly federal in character,
consisting of "the government of New Haven with the plantations in
combination therewith." Though there was no special reservation of town
rights in the fundamental articles which defined the government, yet
the towns, five in number, considered themselves free to withdraw at any
time if they so desired.
We have thus reviewed the conditions under which some forty towns,
grouped under five jurisdictions, were founded in New England. They were
destined to treble their number in the next generation and to suffer
such regrouping as to reduce the jurisdictions to four before the end of
the century--New Hampshire separating from Massachusetts, New Haven
being absorbed by Connecticut, and Plymouth submitting to the authority
of Massachusetts under the charter of 1691. In this readjustment we have
the origin of four of the six New England States of the present day.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE
The people who inhabited these little New England towns were from nearly
every grade of English society, but the greater number were men and
women of humble birth--laborers, artisans, and petty farmers--drawn from
town and country, possessed of scanty education, little or no financial
capital, and but slight experience with the larger world. Some were
middle-class lawyers, merchants, and squires; a few, but very few, were
of higher rank, while scores were of the soil, coarse in language and
habits, and given to practices characteristic of the peasantry of
England at that time. The fact that hardly a fifth of those in
Massachusetts were professed Christians renders it doubtful how far
religious convictions were the only driving motive that sent hundreds of
these men to New England. The leaders were, in a majority of cases,
university men familiar with good literature and possessed of good
libraries, but more cognizant of theology and philosophy than of the law
and order of nature. Some were professional soldiers, simple in thought
as they were courageous in action, while others were men of affairs, who
had acquired experience before the courts and in the counting houses of
England and were often amazingly versatile, able to turn their hands to
any business that confronted them. For the great majority there was
little opportunity in these early years to practice a trade or a
profession. Except for the clergy, who could preach in America with
greater freedom than in England, and for the occasional practitioner in
physic or the law who as time went on found occasion to apply his
knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any
one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians,
or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a
farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended
his skill and his muscle in subduing a tough and unbroken soil.
New England was probably overstocked with men of strong minds and
assertive dispositions. It was settled by radicals who would never have
left the mother country had they not possessed well-formed opinions
regarding some of the most important aspects of religious and social
life. We may call them all Puritans, but as to the details of their
Puritanism they often differed as widely as did Roundheads and Cavaliers
in England. Though representative of a common movement, they were far
from united in their beliefs or consistent in their political practices.
There was always something of the inquisitor at Boston and of the monk
at Plymouth, and in all the Puritan colonies there prevailed a
self-satisfied sense of importance as the chosen of God. The
controversies that arose over jurisdictions and boundaries and the
niceties of doctrine are not edifying, however honest may have been
those who entered into them. Massachusetts and Connecticut always showed
a disposition to stretch their demands for territory to the utmost and
to take what they could, sometimes with little charity or forbearance.
The dominance of the church over the organization and methods of
government and the rigid scrutiny of individual lives and habits, of
which the leaders, notably those of Massachusetts, approved, were hardly
in accord with democracy or personal liberty. Of toleration, except in
Rhode Island, there was none.
The unit of New England life was the town, a self-governing community,
in large measure complete in itself, and if left alone capable of
maintaining a separate existence. Within certain limits, it was
independent of higher authority, and in this respect it was unlike
anything to be found in England. At this period, it was at bottom a
religious community which owned and distributed the lands set apart for
its occupation, elected its own officials, and passed local ordinances
for its own well-being. At first, church members, landholders, and
inhabitants tended to be identical, but they gradually separated as time
went on and as new comers appeared and old residents migrated elsewhere.
Before the end of the century, the ecclesiastical society, the board of
land proprietors, and the town proper, even when largely composed of the
same members, acted as separate groups, though the line of separation
was often vague and was sometimes not drawn at all. Town meetings
continued to be held in the meeting-house, and land was distributed by
the town in its collective capacity. Lands were parceled out as they
were needed in proportion to contributions to a common purchase fund or
to family need, and later according to the ratable value of a man's
property. The fathers of Wallingford in Connecticut, "considering that
even single persons industrious and laborious might through the blessing
of God increase and grow into families," distributed to the meanest
bachelor "such a quantity of land as might in an ordinary way serve for
the comfortable maintenance of a family." Sometimes allotments were
equal; often they varied greatly in size, from an acre to fifty acres
and even more; but always they were determined by a desire to be fair
and just. The land was granted in full right and could be sold or
bequeathed, though at first only with the consent of the community. With
the grant generally went rights in woodland and pasture; and even meadow
land, after the hay was got in, was open to the use of the villagers.
The early New England town took into consideration the welfare and
contentment of the individual, but it rated as of even greater
importance the interests of the whole body.
The settlements of New England inevitably presented great variations of
local life and color, stretching as they did from the Plymouth trucking
posts in Maine, through the fishing villages of Saco and York, and those
on the Piscataqua, to the towns of Long Island and the frontier
communities of western Connecticut--Stamford and Greenwich. The
inhabitants to the number of more than thirty thousand in 1640 were not
only in possession of the coast but were also pushing their way into the
interior. To fishing and agriculture they added trading, lumbering, and
commerce, and were constantly reaching out for new lands and wider
opportunities. The Pilgrims had hardly weathered their first hard winter
when they rebuilt one of their shallops and sent it northward on fishing
and trading voyages; and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and
another to open up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam.
Pynchon was making Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the
interior, though an overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits
and compelling the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of
all the colonies, New Haven was the most distinctly commercial. Stephen
Goodyear built a trucking house on an island below the great falls of
the Housatonic in 1642; other New Haven colonists engaged in ventures on
Delaware Bay; and in 1645, the colony endeavored to open a direct trade
with England. But nearly every New Haven enterprise failed, and by 1660
the wealth of the colony had materially diminished and the settlement
had become "little else than a colony of discouraged farmers." Among all
the colonies in New England and elsewhere there was considerable
coasting traffic, and vessels went to Newfoundland and Bermuda, and even
to the distant West Indies, to Madeira, and to Bilboa across the ocean.
Ever since Winthrop built the _Blessing of the Bay_ in 1631, the first
sea-going craft launched in New England, Massachusetts had been the
leading commercial colony, and her vessels occasionally made the long
triangular voyage to Jamaica, and England, and back to the Bay. The
vessels carried planks, pipe staves, furs, fish, and provisions, and
exchanged them for sugar, molasses, household goods, and other wares and
commodities needed for the comfort and convenience of the colonists.
The older generation was passing away. By 1660, Winthrop, Cotton,
Hooker, Haynes, Bradford, and Whiting were dead; Davenport and Roger
Williams were growing old; some of the ablest men, Peters, Ludlow,
Whitfield, Desborough, Hooke, had returned to England, and others less
conspicuous had gone to the West Indies or to the adjacent colonies.
The younger men were coming on, new arrivals were creeping in, and a
loosening of the old rigidity was affecting the social order. The
Cambridge platform of 1648, which embodied the orthodox features of the
Congregational system as determined up to that time, gave place to the
Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662, which owed its rise to the coming to
maturity of the second generation, the children of the first settlers,
now admitted to membership but not to full communion--a wide departure
from the original purpose of the founders. Rhode Island continued to be
the colony of separatism and soul liberty, where Seeker, Generalist,
Anabaptist, and religious anarchist of the William Harris type found
place, though not always peace. Cotton Mather later said there had never
been "such a variety of religions together on so small a spot as there
have been in that colony."
The coming of the Quakers to Boston in 1656, bringing with them as they
did some of the very religious ideas that had caused Mrs. Hutchinson and
John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived anew the old issue and
roused the orthodox colonies to deny admission to ranters, heretics,
Quakers, and the like. Boston burned their books as "corrupt,
heretical, and blasphemous," flung these people into prison with every
mark of indignity, branded them as enemies of the established order in
church and commonwealth, and tried to prove that they were witches and
emissaries of Satan. The first-comers were sent back to Barbados whence
they came; the next were returned to England; those of 1657 were
scourged; those of 1658, under the Massachusetts law of the previous
year, were mutilated and, when all these measures had no effect, under
the harsher law of October, 1658, four were hanged. One of these, Mary
Dyer, though reprieved and banished, persisted in returning to her
death. The Quakers were scourged in Plymouth, branded in New Haven,
flogged at the cart's tail on Long Island, and chained to a wheelbarrow
at New Amsterdam. Upon Connecticut they made almost no impression; only
in Piscataqua, Rhode Island, Nantucket, and Eastern Long Island did they
find a resting place.
To the awe inspired by the covenant with God was added the terror
aroused by the dread power of Satan; and witchcraft inevitably took its
place in the annals of New England Puritanism as it had done for a
century in the annals of the older world. Not one of the colonies,
except Rhode Island, was free from its manifestations. Plymouth had two
cases which came to trial, but no executions; Connecticut and New Haven
had many trials and a number of executions, beginning with that of Alse
Young in Windsor in 1647, the first execution for witchcraft in New
England. The witch panic, a fearful exhibition of human terror, appeared
in Massachusetts as early as 1648, and ran its sinister course for more
than forty years, involving high and low alike and disclosing an amazing
amount of credulity and superstition. To the Puritan the power of Satan
was ever imminent, working through friend or foe, and using the human
form as an instrument of injury to the chosen of God. The great epidemic
of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, the climax and close of the delusion,
resulted in the imprisonment of over two hundred persons and the
execution of nineteen. Some of those who sat in the court of trial later
came to their senses and were heartily ashamed of their share in the
proceedings.
The New Englander of the seventeenth century, courageous as he was and
loyal to his religious convictions, was in a majority of cases gifted
with but a meager mental outfit. The unknown world frightened and
appalled him; Satan warring with the righteous was an ever-present
menace to his soul; the will of God controlled the events of his daily
life, whether for good or ill. The book of nature and the physiology and
ailments of his own body he comprehended with the mind of a child. He
believed that the planet upon which he lived was the center of the
universe, that the stars were burning vapors, and the moon and comets
agencies controlling human destinies. Strange portents presaged disaster
or wrought evil works. Many a New Englander's life was governed
according to the supposed influence of the heavenly bodies; Bradford
believed that there was a connection between a cyclone and an eclipse;
and Morton defined an earthquake as a movement of wind shut up in the
pores and bowels of the earth.
Of medicine the Puritans knew little and practised less. They swallowed
doses of weird and repelling concoctions, wore charms and amulets, found
comfort and relief in internal and external remedies that could have had
no possible influence upon the cause of the trouble, and when all else
failed they fell back upon the mercy and will of God. Surgery was a
matter of tooth-pulling and bone-setting, and though post-mortems were
performed, we have no knowledge of the skill of the practitioner. The
healing art, as well as nursing and midwifery, was frequently in the
hands of women, one of whom deposed: "I was able to live by my
chirurgery, but now I am blind and cannot see a wound, much less dress
it or make salves"; and Jane Hawkins of Boston, the "bosom friend" of
Mrs. Hutchinson, was forbidden by the general courts "to meddle in
surgery or physic, drink, plaisters or oils," as well as religion. The
men who practised physic were generally homebred, making the greater
part of their living at farming or agriculture. Some were ministers as
well as physicians, and one of them (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes is sorry
to say) "took to drink and tumbled into the Connecticut River, and so
ended." There were a number of regularly trained doctors, such as John
Clark of Newbury, Fuller of Plymouth, Rossiter of Guilford, and others;
and the younger Winthrop, though not a physician, had more than a
smattering of medicine.
The mass of the New Englanders of the seventeenth century had but little
education and but few opportunities for travel. As early as 1642,
Massachusetts required that every child should be taught to read, and
in 1647 enacted a law ordaining that every township should appoint a
schoolmaster, and that the larger towns should each set up a grammar
school. This well-known and much praised enactment, which made education
the handmaid of religion and was designed to stem the tide of religious
indifference rising over the colony, was better in intention than in
execution. It had little effect at first, and even when under its
provisions the common school gradually took root in New England, the
education given was of a very primitive variety. Harvard College itself,
chartered in 1636, was a seat of but a moderate amount of learning and
at its best had only the training of the clergy in view. In Hartford and
New Haven, grammar schools were founded under the bequest of Governor
Hopkins, but came to little in the seventeenth century. In 1674, one
Robert Bartlett left money for the setting up of a free school in New
London, for the teaching of Latin to poor children, but the hope was
richer than the fulfilment. In truth, of education for the laity at this
time in New England there was scarcely more than the rudiments of
reading, writing, and arithmetic. The frugal townspeople of New England
generally deemed education an unnecessary expense; the school laws were
evaded, and when complied with were more honored in the breach than in
the observance. Even when honestly carried out, they produced but
slender results. Probably most people could sign their names after a
fashion, though many extant wills and depositions bear only the marks of
their signers. Schoolmasters and town clerks had difficulties with
spelling and grammar, and the rural population were too much engrossed
by their farm labors to find much time for the improvement of the mind.
Except in the homes of the clergy and the leading men of the larger
towns there were few books, and those chiefly of a religious character.
The English Bible and Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, printed in Boston
in 1681, were most frequently read, and in the houses of the farmers the
_British Almanac_ was occasionally found. There were no newspapers, and
printing had as yet made little progress.
The daily routine of clearing the soil, tilling the arable land, raising
corn, rye, wheat, oats, and flax, of gathering iron ore from bogs and
turpentine from pine trees, and in other ways of providing the means of
existence, rendered life essentially stationary and isolated, and the
mind was but slightly quickened by association with the larger world. A
little journeying was done on foot, on horseback, or by water, but the
trip from colony to colony was rarely undertaken; and even within the
colony itself but few went far beyond the borders of their own
townships, except those who sat as deputies in the assembly or engaged
in hunting, trading, fishing, or in wars with the Indians. A Connecticut
man could speak of "going abroad" to Rhode Island. Though in the larger
towns good houses were built, generally of wood and sometimes of brick,
in the remoter districts the buildings were crude, with rooms on one
floor and a ladder to the chamber above, where corn was frequently
stored. Along the Pawcatuck River, families lived in cellars along with
their pigs. Clapboards and shingles came in slowly as sawmills
increased, but at first nails and glass were rare luxuries. Conditions
in such seaports as Boston, where ships came and went and higher
standards of living prevailed, must not be taken as typical of the whole
country. The buildings of Boston in 1683 were spoken of as "handsome,
joining one to another as in London, with many large streets, most of
them paved with pebble stone." Money in the country towns was
merchantable wheat, peas, pork, and beef at prices current. Time was
reckoned by the farmers according to the seasons, not according to the
calendar, and men dated events by "sweet corn time," "at the beginning
of last hog time," "since Indian harvest," and "the latter part of seed
time for winter wheat."
New England was a frontier land far removed from the older
civilizations, and its people were always restive under restraint and
convention. They were in the main men and women of good sense, sobriety,
and thrift, who worked hard, squandered nothing, feared God, and honored
the King, but the equipment they brought with them to America was
insufficient at best and had to be replaced, as the years wore on, from
resources developed on New England soil.
CHAPTER V
AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION
The men who controlled the destinies of New England were deeply
concerned not only with preserving its faith but also with guarding its
rights and liberties as they defined them, and reverentially preserving
the letter of its charters. For men who wished to sever their connection
with England and to disregard English law and precedent as much as
possible, they displayed a remarkable amount of respect for the
documents that emanated from the British Chancery. In fact, however,
they valued these grants and charters, not as expressions of royal
favor, but as bulwarks against royal encroachment and outside
interference, and in accepting such privileges as were conferred by
their charters, they recognized no duty to be performed for the common
mother, no obligations resting upon themselves to consider the welfare
of England or to coöperate in her behalf.
The thoughts of these men were of themselves, their faith, and their
problems of existence. The strongest ties were those that held together
the people of a town, closely knit in the bond of a civil and religious
covenant. Next above these were the ties of the colony, with its general
court or assembly composed of representatives of the towns, its governor
and other officials elected by the freemen, and its laws passed by the
assembly for the benefit and well-being of all. Higher still was the
loose bond of confederation that was fashioned in 1643 for the
maintenance of order, peace, and security, in the form of a league of
colonies. Highest, but weakest of all, was the bond that united them to
England, recognized in sentiment but carrying with it no reciprocal
obligations, either legal or otherwise. To the average inhabitant of New
England, the mother country was merely the land from which he had come,
the home to which he might or might not return. He had practically no
knowledge of England's plans or policy, no comprehension of her purpose
toward her colonies or the place of the colonies in her own scheme of
expansion. He was absorbed in his own affairs, not in those of England;
in the commands of God, not in those of the King; and in the dangers
which surrounded him from the foes of the frontier, not in those which
confronted England in her relations with her continental rivals. He was
dominated by his instinct for self-government and by his compelling fear
of the Stuarts and all that they represented. Even during the period of
the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, England was three thousand miles
away, appeal to her was difficult and costly, and the English brethren
were not always as sympathetic as they might have been with the aims and
methods of their co-religionists.
This very isolation from the mother country, at a time when the New
Englanders were pushing their fur-trading activities into the regions
claimed by the Dutch and the French, rendered some sort of united action
necessary and desirable. The settlers were of one stock and one purpose.
Despite bickerings and disputes, they shared a common desire to enjoy
the liberties of the Christian religion and to obtain from the new
country into which they had come both subsistence and profit. The
determination to open up trading posts on the Penobscot, the Delaware,
and the Hudson, and to utilize all waters for their fisheries brought
them into conflict with their rivals, at New Amsterdam and in Nova
Scotia, and made it imperative, should any one colony--Plymouth,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Haven--attempt to pursue its plans
alone, for all to band together in its support. The troubles already
encountered with the Dutch on the Delaware and the Connecticut and with
the French in Maine, in the competition for the fur trade of the
interior, had rendered the situation acute and led, very early, to the
proposal that a combination be effected.
But it was not until 1643 that anything was accomplished. In May of that
year, at the suggestion of Connecticut and New Haven, commissioners from
these colonies, and from Massachusetts and Plymouth also, met at Boston
and drafted a body of articles for a consociation or confederation to be
known as the United Colonies of New England, a form of union which found
a precedent in the federation of the Netherlands and corresponded in the
political field to the consociation of churches in the ecclesiastical.
Maine was not asked because, as a province belonging to Gorges, the
people there (to quote from Winthrop's _Journal_) "ran a different
course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil
administration, ... had lately made Acomenticus (a poor village) a
corporation, and had made a taylor their mayor, and had entertained one
Hull, an excommunicated person and very contentious, for their
minister." Rhode Island, as a seat of separatism and heresy, was not
invited and perhaps not even considered. For managing the affairs of the
confederation, the main objects of which were friendship and amity,
protection and defense, advice and succor, and the preservation of the
truth and purity of the Gospel, eight commissioners were provided, to be
chosen by the assemblies of the colonies and to represent the colonies
as independent political units. Meetings were to be held once a year in
one or other of the leading towns and a full record was to be kept of
the business done. The board thus established never did more than make
recommendations and offer advice, as it had no authority to execute any
of the plans that it might make; and although the records of its
meetings are lengthy and give evidence of elaborate discussion of
important matters, the results of its deliberations cannot be said to be
particularly significant.
The commissioners dealt with a number of local disputes of no great
moment and considered certain internal difficulties that threatened to
disturb the friendly intercourse among the colonies. For instance,
Connecticut had levied tolls at Saybrook on vessels going up the
Connecticut River to Springfield, and Massachusetts had retaliated by
laying duties on goods from other colonies entering her ports. Under
pressure from the commissioners both the colonies receded from their
positions. Again, the commissioners recommended the granting of aid to
Harvard College, and that institution consequently received from
Connecticut and New Haven annually for many years a regular allowance,
in return for which it presented the Connecticut colony with nearly
sixty graduates in the ensuing half-century well equipped to combat
latitudinarianism and heresy. The commissioners fulfilled their
obligation as guardians of the purity of the Gospel, both in their
support of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to
check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition
of church membership--efforts which eventually resulted in that
"illogical compromise," the Half-Way Covenant. They recommended the
driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature,"
and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They
upheld the work of the Society for the Promoting and Propagating of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and they directed and guided the
labors of its missionaries, most notable of whom was the famous John
Eliot, apostle to the Indians and translator of the Bible into their
language.
The most important business of the confederation concerned the defense
of New England against the Indians, the Dutch, and the French. The
Indians were an ever-present menace, near and far; the Dutch disputed
the English claims all the way from New Amsterdam to Narragansett Bay,
and resented the attempts already made to encroach upon their trading
grounds; and the French at this time were strenuously denying the right
of the English, particularly those of Plymouth, to establish
trading-posts at Machias and on the Penobscot, and were laying claim to
all the Nova Scotian territory as far west as the Penobscot.
Though the French, in their effort to drive out all the English settlers
east of Pemaquid in Maine, had destroyed two Plymouth posts in that
region, the commissioners were called upon to decide not so much what
should be done about this act of aggression, as which of the claimants
among the French themselves it was wiser for the colonies to support. A
certain Charles de la Tour had been commissioned by the Governor-General
of Acadia or Nova Scotia as lieutenant of the region east of the St.
Croix, and another, Charles de Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay-Charnisé, as
lieutenant of the region between the St. Croix and the Penobscot. When
the Governor-General died in 1635, a contest for the governorship took
place between these two men, and not unnaturally volunteers from
Massachusetts aided La Tour, whose original jurisdiction was farthest
removed from their colony. Trade on these northeastern coasts was deemed
essential to the prosperity of the New Englanders, and it was considered
of great importance to make no mistake in backing the wrong claimant.
D'Aulnay, or more correctly Aulnay, had been partly responsible for the
attack on the Plymouth trading-posts, but, on the other hand, he had the
stronger title; and Massachusetts was a good deal perplexed as to what
course to pursue. In 1644, Aulnay sent a commissioner to Boston, who
conversed with Governor Endecott in French and with the rest of the
magistrates in Latin and endeavored to arrange terms of peace. Two
years later the same commissioner came again, with two others, and was
cordially entertained with "wine and sweetmeats." The matter was
referred to the commissioners of the United Colonies, who decided, with
considerable shrewdness, that the volunteers in aiding La Tour had acted
efficiently but not wisely; and consequently a compromise was reached.
Aulnay's commissioners abated their claims for damages, and Governor
Winthrop consented to send "a small present" to Aulnay in lieu of
compensation. The present was "a fair new sedan (worth," says Winthrop,
"forty or fifty pounds, where it was made, but of no use to us)," having
been part of some Spanish booty taken in the West Indies and presented
to the Governor. So final peace was made at no expense to the colony;
and later, after Aulnay's death in 1650, La Tour married the widow and
came to his own in Nova Scotia.
The troubles with the Dutch were not so easily settled. England had
never acknowledged the Dutch claim to New Amsterdam, and the New England
Council in making its grants had paid no attention to the Dutch
occupation. Though trade had been carried on and early relations had
been on the whole amicable, yet, after Connecticut's overthrow of the
Pequots in 1637 and the opening of the territory to settlement, the
founding of towns as far west as Stamford and Greenwich had rendered
acute the conflict of titles. There was no western limit to the English
claims, and, as the colonists were perfectly willing to accept Sir
William Boswell's advice to "crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of those
places which they have occupied, without hostility or any act of
violence," a collision was bound to come. The Dutch, who in their turn
were not abating a jot of their claims, had already destroyed a New
Haven settlement on the Delaware, and had asserted rights of
jurisdiction even in New Haven harbor, by seizing there one of their own
ships charged with evading the laws of New Amsterdam. Peter Stuyvesant,
the Dutch Governor, famous for his short temper and mythical silver leg,
visited Hartford in 1650, and negotiated with the commissioners of the
United Colonies a treaty drawing the boundary line from the west side of
Greenwich Bay northward twenty miles. But this treaty, though ratified
by the States General of Holland, was never ratified by England, and,
when two years later war between the two countries broke out overseas,
the question of an attack on New Amsterdam was taken up and debated with
such heat as nearly to disrupt the Confederation. The absolute refusal
of Massachusetts to enter on such an undertaking so prolonged the
discussion that the war was over before a decision was reached; but
Connecticut seized the Dutch lands at Hartford, and Roger Ludlow, who
had moved to Fairfield from Windsor after 1640, began an abortive
military campaign of his own. The situation remained unchanged as long
as the Dutch held New Netherland, and the region between Greenwich and
the Bronx continued to be what it had been from the beginning of
settlement, a territory occupied only by Indians and a few straggling
emigrants. There the unfortunate Anne Hutchinson with her family was
massacred by the Indians in 1643.
The New England Confederation performed the most important part of its
work during the first twenty years of its existence, for although it
lasted nominally till 1684, it ceased to be effective after 1664, and
was of little weight in New England history after the restoration of the
Stuarts. Owing to the fact that it had been formed without any authority
from England, the Confederation was never recognized by the Government
there, and with the return of the monarchy it survived chiefly as an
occasional committee meeting for debate and advice.
CHAPTER VI
WINNING THE CHARTERS
The accession of Charles II to the throne of England provoked a crisis
in the affairs of the Puritans and gave rise to many problems that the
New Englanders had not anticipated and did not know how to solve. With a
Stuart again in control, there were many questions that might be easily
asked but less easily answered. Except for Massachusetts and Plymouth,
not a settlement had a legal title to its soil; and except for
Massachusetts, not one had ever received a sufficient warrant for the
government which it had set up. Naturally, therefore, there was
disquietude in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven; and even
Massachusetts, buttressed as she was, feared lest the King might object
to many of the things she had done. Entrenched behind her charter and
aware of her superiority in wealth, territory, and population, she had
taken the leadership in New England and had used her opportunity to
intimidate her neighbors. Except for New Haven, not a colony or group of
settlements but had felt the weight of her claims. Plymouth and
Connecticut had protested against her demands; the Narragansett towns
with difficulty had evaded her attempt to absorb them; and the
settlements at Piscataqua and on the Maine coast had finally yielded to
her jurisdiction. As long as Cromwell lived and the Government of
England was under Puritan direction, Massachusetts had little to fear
from protests against her; but, with the Cromwellian régime at an end,
she could not expect from the restored monarchy a favoring or friendly
attitude.
The change in England was not merely one of government; it was one of
policy as well. Even during the Cromwellian period, Englishmen awoke to
a greater appreciation of the importance of colonies as assets of the
mother country, and began to realize, in a fashion unknown to the
earlier period, the necessity of extending and strengthening England's
possessions in America. England was engaged in a desperate commercial
war with Holland, whose vessels had obtained a monopoly of the carrying
trade of the world; and to win in that conflict it was imperative that
her statesmen should husband every resource that the kingdom possessed.
The religious agitations of previous years were passing away and the New
England colonies were not likely to be troubled on account of their
Puritanism. The great question in England was not religious conformity
but national strength based on commercial prosperity.
Thus England was fashioning a new system and defining a new policy. By
means of navigation acts, she barred the Dutch from the carrying trade
and confined colonial commerce in large part to the mother country. She
established councils and committees of trade and plantations, and, by
the seizure of New Netherland in 1664 and the grant of the Carolinas and
the Bahamas in 1663 and 1670, she completed the chain of her possessions
in America from New England to Barbados. A far-flung colonial world was
gradually taking shape, demanding of the King and his advisers an
interest in America of a kind hitherto unknown. It is not surprising
that so vast a problem, involving the trade and defense of nearly twenty
colonies, should have made the internal affairs of New England seem of
less consequence to the royal authorities than had been the case in the
days of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, when the obtaining of the
Massachusetts Bay charter had roused such intensity of feeling in
England. What was interesting Englishmen was no longer the matter of
religious obedience in the colonies, but rather that of their political
and commercial dependence on the mother country.
As the future of New England was certain to be debated at Whitehall
after 1660, the colonies took pains to have representatives on the
ground to meet criticisms and complaints, to ward off attacks, and to
beg for favors. Rhode Island sent a commission to Dr. John Clarke, one
of her founders and leading men, at that time in London, instructing him
to ask for royal protection, self-government, liberty of conscience, and
a charter. Massachusetts sent Simon Bradstreet and the Reverend John
Norton, with a petition that reads like a sermon, praying the King not
to listen to other men's words but to grant the colonists an opportunity
to answer for themselves, they being "true men, fearers of God and the
King, not given to change, orthodox and peaceable in Israel."
Connecticut, with more worldly wisdom, sent John Winthrop, the Governor,
a man courtly and tactful, with a petition shrewdly worded and to the
point. Plymouth entrusted her mission also to Winthrop, hoping for a
confirmation of her political and religious liberties. All protested
their loyalty to the Crown, while Massachusetts, her petition signed by
the stiff-necked Endecott, prostrated herself at the royal feet, craving
pardon for her boldness, and subscribing herself "Your Majesties most
humble subjects and suppliants." Did Endecott remember, we wonder, a
certain incident connected with the royal ensign at Salem?
Against the lesser colonies no complaints were presented, except in the
case of New Haven, which was charged by the inhabitants of Shelter
Island with usurpation of their goods and territory; but for
Massachusetts the restoration of the Stuarts opened a veritable
Pandora's box of troubles. In "divers complaints, petitions, and other
informations concerning New England," she was accused of overbearance
and oppression, of seizing the territory of New Hampshire and Maine, of
denying the rights of Englishmen to Anglicans and non-freemen of the
colony, and of persecuting the Quakers and others of religious views
different from her own. She was declared to be seeking independence of
Crown and Parliament by forbidding appeals to England, refusing to
enforce the oath of allegiance to the King, and in general exceeding the
powers laid down in her charter. The new plantations council,
commissioned by the King in December, 1660, sent a peremptory letter the
following April ordering the colony to proclaim the King "in the most
solemn manner," and to hold herself in readiness to answer complaints by
appointing persons well instructed to represent her before itself in
England. At the same time, it begged the King to go slowly, giving
Massachusetts an opportunity to be heard, and to write a letter "with
all possible tenderness," pointing out that submission to the royal
authority was absolutely essential. This the King did, confirming the
charter of Massachusetts, renewing the colony's rights and privileges,
and in conciliatory fashion ascribing all derelictions of duty to the
iniquity of the times rather than to any evil intention of the heart.
Then declaring that the chief aim of the charter was liberty of
conscience, the King struck at the very heart of the Massachusetts
system, by commanding the magistrates to grant full liberty of worship
to members of the Anglican Church and the right to vote to all who were
"orthodox" in religion and possessed of "competent estates." Though this
order was evaded by various definitions of "orthodox" and "competent
estates" and was not to be fully executed for many years, yet its
meaning was clear--no single religious body would ever again be allowed,
by the royal authorities in England, to monopolize the government or
control the political destinies of a British colony in America or
elsewhere.
The policy thus adopted toward Massachusetts became even more
conciliatory when applied to the other colonies. It is not improbable
that the King's advisers saw in the strengthening of Connecticut and
Rhode Island an opportunity to check the power of Massachusetts and to
reduce her importance in New England. However that may be, they lent
themselves to the efforts that Winthrop and Clarke were making to obtain
charters for their respective colonies. These agents were able,
discreet, and broadminded men. Clarke, a resident in England for a
number of years, had acquired no little personal influence; and
Winthrop, as an old-time friend of the English lords and gentlemen whose
governor he had been at Saybrook, could count on the help of the one
surviving member of that group, Lord Saye and Sele, who was a privy
councillor, a member of the House of Lords and of the plantations
council, and, as we are told, Lord Privy Seal, a position that would be
of direct service in expediting the issue of a charter. Winthrop had
personal qualities, also, that made for success. He was a university
man, had made the grand tour of the Continent, and was familiar with
official traditions and the ways of the court. Soon after his arrival in
England, he became a member of the Royal Society and served on several
of its committees, and thus had an opportunity of making friends and of
showing his interest in other things than theology. If Cotton Mather was
rightly informed, Winthrop was accorded a personal interview with
Charles II and presented the King with a ring which Charles I, as Prince
of Wales, had given his grandfather, Adam Winthrop.
Winthrop made good use of a good cause. Connecticut had behaved herself
well and had incurred no ill-will. She had had no dealings with the
Cromwellian Government, had dutifully proclaimed the King, had been
discreet in her attitude toward Whalley and Goffe, the regicides who had
fled to New England, and had aroused no resentment against herself among
her neighbors. With proceedings once begun, the securing of the charter
went rapidly forward. Winthrop at first petitioned for a confirmation
of the old Warwick patent, which had been purchased of the English lords
and gentlemen in 1644, but later, encouraged it may be by friends in
England, he asked for a charter. The request was granted.[2] The
document gave to Connecticut the same boundaries as those of the old
patent, and conferred powers of government identical with those of the
Fundamental Orders of 1639. That the main features of the charter were
drawn up in the colony before Winthrop sailed is probable, though it is
not impossible that they were drafted in London by Winthrop himself. All
that the English officials did was to give the text its proper legal
form.
After the receipt of the charter and its proclamation in the colony and
after a slight readjustment of the government to meet the few changes
required, the general court of Connecticut proceeded to enforce the full
territorial rights of the colony. The men of Connecticut had made up
their minds, now that the charter had come, to execute its terms to the
uttermost and to extend the authority of the colony to the farthest
bounds, so that, next to the government of the Bay, Connecticut might
be the greatest in New England. The court took under its protection the
towns of Stamford and Greenwich, and on the ground that the whole
territory westward was within its jurisdiction warned the Dutch governor
not to meddle. It accepted the petition of Southold on Long Island and
of certain residents of Guilford, both of the New Haven federation, for
annexation, and, sending a force to Long Island to demand the surrender
of the western towns there, it seized Captain John Scott, who was
planning to establish a separate government over them, and brought him
to Hartford for trial. It informed the towns of Mystic and Pawcatuck,
lying in the disputed land between Connecticut and Rhode Island, that
they were in the Connecticut colony and must henceforth conduct their
affairs according to its laws. The relations with Rhode Island were to
be a matter of later adjustment, and no immediate trouble followed; but
Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, protested angrily against Connecticut's
claim to Dutch territory and brought the matter to the attention of the
commissioners of the United Colonies. On one pretext or another, the
latter delayed action; and the matter was not settled until England's
seizure of New Amsterdam in 1664 brought the Dutch rule to an end and
made operative the royal grant of the territory to the Duke of York,
thus stopping Connecticut in her somewhat headlong career westward and
taking from her the whole of Long Island and all the land west of the
Connecticut River. If maintained, this grant would have reduced the
colony by half and would have materially retarded its progress; but
Connecticut eventually saved the western portion of her territory as far
as the line of 1650. However, her people could do no more crowding on
into the region beyond, for the province of New York now lay directly
across the path of her westward expansion.
But with New Haven her success was complete. That unfortunate colony,
which had made an effort to obtain a patent in 1645, when the "great
ship," bearing the agent Gregson, had foundered with all on board, had
no friends at court, and had been too poor after 1660 to join the other
colonies in sending an agent to London. Consequently its right to exist
as an independent government was not considered in the negotiations
which Winthrop had carried on. Serious complaints had been raised
against it; its rigorous theocratic policy had created divisions among
its own people, many of whom had begun to protest; it had been friendly
with the Cromwellian régime and had proclaimed Charles II unwillingly
and after long delay; it had protected the regicides until the
messengers sent out for their capture could report the colony as
"obstinate and pertinacious in contempt of His Majestie." Governor
Leete, of the younger generation, was not in sympathy with Davenport's
persistent refusal of all overtures from Hartford, and would probably
have favored union under the charter of 1662 if Connecticut had been
less aggressive in her attitude. As it was, the controversy became
pungent and was prolonged for more than two years, though the outcome
was never uncertain. The New Haven colony was poor, unprotected, and
divided against itself. Its population was decreasing; Indian massacres
threatened its frontiers; the malcontents of Guilford, led by Bray
Rossiter, were demanding immediate and unconditional surrender to
Connecticut; and finally in 1664 the successful capture of New
Netherland and the grant to the Duke of York threatened the colony with
annexation from that quarter. Rather than be joined to New York, New
Haven surrendered. One by one the towns broke away until in December of
that year only Branford, Guilford, and New Haven remained. On December
13, 1664, the freemen of these towns, with a few others, voted to
submit, "as from a necessity ... but with a _salvo jure_ of our former
right & claime, as a people who have not yet been heard in point of
plea."
The New Haven federation was dissolved; Davenport withdrew to Boston,
where he became a participant in the religious life of that colony; and
the strict Puritans of Branford, Guilford, and Milford, led by Abraham
Pierson, went to New Jersey and founded Newark. The towns, left loose
and at large, joined Connecticut voluntarily and separately, and the New
Haven colony ceased to exist. But the dual capital of Connecticut and
the alternate meetings of its legislature in Hartford and New Haven,
marked for more than two hundred years the twofold origin of the colony
and the state.
In the meantime Rhode Island had become a legally incorporated colony.
Even before Winthrop sailed for England, Dr. John Clarke had received a
favorable reply to his petition for a charter. But a year passed and
nothing was done about the matter, probably owing to the arrival of
Winthrop and the feeling of uncertainty aroused by the conflicting
boundary claims, which involved a stretch of some twenty-five miles of
territory between Narragansett Bay and the Pawcatuck River. A third
claimant also appeared, the Atherton Company, with its headquarters in
Boston, which had purchased lands of the Indians at various points in
the area and held them under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. When
Clarke heard that Winthrop, in drawing the boundaries for the
Connecticut charter of 1662, had included this Narragansett territory,
he protested vehemently to the King, saying that Connecticut had
"injuriously swallowed up the one-half of our colonie," and demanding a
reconsideration. Finally, after the question had been debated in the
presence of Clarendon and others, the decision was reached to give Rhode
Island the boundaries and charter she desired, but to leave the question
of conflicting claims for later settlement. Evidently Winthrop, though
not agreeing with Clarke in matters of fact regarding the boundaries,
supported Rhode Island's appeal for a charter, for Clarendon said
afterwards that the draft which Clarke presented had in it expressions
that were disliked, but that the charter was granted out of regard for
Winthrop.
The Rhode Island charter passed the seals July 8, 1663, and was received
in the colony four months later with great joy and thanksgiving. It
created a common government for all the towns, guaranteeing full liberty
"in religious concernments" and freedom from all obligations to conform
to the "litturgy, formes, and ceremonyes of the Church of England, or
take or subscribe the oathes and articles made and established in that
behalfe." This may have been the phrase that Clarendon, who was a High
Churchman, objected to when the draft was presented. The form of
government was similar in all essential particulars to that of
Connecticut.
Rhode Island's enthusiasm in obtaining a charter is not difficult to
understand. That amphibious colony, consisting of mainland, islands, and
a large body of water, was inhabited by "poor despised peasants," as
Governor Brenton described them, "living remote in the woods" and
subject to the "envious and subtle contrivances of our neighbour
colonies round about us, who are in a combination united together to
swallow us up." The colony had not been asked to join the New England
Confederation, and its leaders were convinced that the members of the
Confederation were in league to filch away their lands and, by driving
them into the sea, to eliminate the colony altogether. Plymouth, seeking
a better harbor than that of Plymouth Bay, claimed the eastern mainland
as well as the chief islands, Hog, Conanicut, and Aquidneck;
Massachusetts claimed Pawtuxet, Warwick, and the Narragansett country
generally; while Connecticut wished to push her eastern boundary as far
beyond the Pawcatuck River (the present boundary) as she might be able
to do. Had each of these colonies made good its claim, there would have
been little left of Rhode Island, and we do not wonder that the settlers
looked upon themselves as fighting, with their backs to the sea, for
their very existence. Hence they welcomed the charter with the joy of
one relieved of a great burden, for, though the boundary question
remained unsettled, the charter assured the colony of its right to exist
under royal protection.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] The King's warrant was issued on February 28, the writ of Privy Seal
on April 23, and the great seal was affixed on May 10, 1662.
CHAPTER VII
MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT
Massachusetts was yet to be taken in hand. The English authorities had
become convinced that a satisfactory settlement of all the difficulties
in New England could be undertaken not in England, where the facts were
hard to get at, but in America. Lord Clarendon, the Chancellor, had been
in correspondence with Samuel Maverick, an early settler in New England
and for many years a resident of Boston and New Amsterdam. As an
Anglican, Maverick had sympathized with the opposition in Massachusetts
led by Dr. Robert Child, and had been debarred from all civil and
religious rights in the colony; but he was a man of sobriety and good
judgment, whose chief cause of offense was a difference of opinion as to
how a colony should conduct its government. The fact that he had been
able to get on with the Massachusetts men shows that his attitude had
never been seriously aggressive, for though he certainly had no liking
for the policy of the colony, he does not appear to have been influenced
by any hostility towards Massachusetts.
Happening to be in England at this juncture, Maverick was called upon by
the Chancellor to state the case against the colony, and this he did in
several letters, giving many instances of the colony's disloyalty and
injustice, and recommending that its privileges be taken away, just as
it had taken away the privileges of others. To this suggestion Clarendon
paid no heed, for it was no part of the royal purpose to drive the
colonies to desperation at a time when the King was but newly come to
his throne and needed all his resources in the struggle with the Dutch.
But to Maverick's further suggestions that New Netherland be reduced,
that Massachusetts be regulated, and that commissioners be sent over to
accomplish these ends, he expressed himself as favorable, and all were
finally accepted by the Government. Maverick's opinion that British
control should be exercised over a British possession and that the
government of such a possession should not be conducted after the
fashion of an ecclesiastical society happened to coincide with that of
the King's advisers and, as Maverick had lived in America for thirty
years, his advice was listened to with respect and approval. All thought
that, while Massachusetts might not be driven with safety, she could
probably be persuaded to admit some alteration in her methods of
government by tactful representatives.
Had the Duke of York, to whom was entrusted the task of selecting the
new commissioners, chosen his men as wisely as Clarendon had shaped his
policy, the results, as far as Massachusetts was concerned, might have
been more successful. The trouble lay with the character of the work to
be done. On the one hand the Dutch colony was to be seized by force of
arms, a military undertaking involving boldness and executive ability;
on the other, the Puritan colonies were to be regulated, a mission which
called for the utmost tact. The men chosen for the work were far from
the best that might have been selected to bring back to the path of true
obedience and impartial justice a colony that was deemed wilful and
perverse. They were Richard Nicolls, a favorite of the Duke of York and
the only commissioner possessed of discrimination and wisdom, but who,
as governor of the yet unconquered Dutch colony, was likely to be taken
up with his duties to such an extent as to preclude his sharing
prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George
Cartwright, a soldier, well-meaning but devoid of sympathy and ignorant
of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the
four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his
temper or his passions; and, lastly, Maverick himself, opposed to the
existing order in Massachusetts and convinced of the necessity of
radical changes in the constitution of the colony. Nicolls was liked and
respected; Cartwright and Carr were distrusted as soldiers and
strangers, and their presence was resented; whereas Maverick was
objected to as a malcontent who had gone to England to complain and had
returned with power to make trouble. When the colony heard of his
appointment, it sent a vigorous address of protest to the King. If
Clarendon expected from the last three of these men the wisdom and
discretion that he said were essential to the task, he strangely
misjudged their characters. He thought, to be sure, of adding other
commissioners from New England, but he did not know whom to select and
was fearful of arousing local jealousies. Yet considering the work to
be done, it is doubtful if any commissioners, no matter how wisely
selected, could have performed the task, for Massachusetts did not want
to be regulated.
The general object of the commission was "to unite and reconcile persons
of very different judgments and practice in all things," particularly
concerning "the peace and prosperity of the people and their joint
submission and obedience to us and our government." More specifically,
the commissioners were to effect the overthrow of the Dutch, investigate
conditions among the Indians, capture the regicides, secure obedience to
the navigation acts, look into the question of boundaries, and determine
the title to the Narragansett country, henceforth to be called the
King's Province. The commissioners were to make it clear that they were
not come to interfere with the prevailing religious systems, but to
demand liberty of conscience for all, though Clarendon could not repress
the hope that ultimately the New Englanders might return to the Anglican
fold. The secret instructions were even more remarkable as evidence of a
complete misunderstanding of conditions in New England. Clarendon wished
to secure for the Crown the power to nominate or at least to approve
the governor of Massachusetts, to control the militia, and to examine
and correct the laws--powers, it may be noted, which were exercised in
every royal colony as a matter of course. He suggested that the
commissioners interest themselves in the elections so far as "to gett
men of the best reputation and most peaceably inclined" chosen to the
assembly, but he cautioned them to "proceed very warily" in some of
these things. He had a hope that Massachusetts might be so wrought upon
as to choose Nicolls for her governor and Carr for her major-general,
but in this, as in the pious hope of a return of the Puritans to the
Church of England, he reckoned without a knowledge of the grimness of
the Massachusetts temper.
The commissioners reached Boston, _en route_ for New Amsterdam, late in
July, 1664, asked for troops, and demanded the repeal of the franchise
law. The magistrates took the precaution to conceal the charter; they
were also heartily glad when the commissioners departed on their errand
of conquest and hoped they would not return. The general court, having
modified the franchise law sufficiently to meet the letter of the King's
command, wrote His Majesty that they wished he would recall his
emissaries; and when the magistrates discovered that this impertinent
demand not only failed of its object but drew down upon the colony a
royal rebuke, with characteristic shrewdness they shifted their ground
and prepared to meet the commissioners in fair contest, wearing out
their patience and thwarting their plans by every available device. In
the meantime, the four men were completing the conquest and pacification
of New Netherland, and rearranging the boundary difficulties with
Connecticut. Then Maverick and Cartwright passed on to Boston, where
they were joined in February by Carr, Nicolls remaining in New York. The
three men, making Boston their headquarters, visited Plymouth, Newport,
and Hartford, where they were received, according to their account,
"with great expressions of loyalty"--a statement which, if true, shows
how successfully the colonists suppressed their deeper feelings. Having
taken the King's Province under the royal protection, and postponed for
later consideration the question of the boundary line between Rhode
Island and Connecticut, with new complaints against Massachusetts
ringing in their ears, they returned to Boston to meet the defiant
magistrates. There Nicolls joined them in May.
The Massachusetts mission was hopeless from the beginning. The
magistrates and general court would not admit the right of the
commissioners to interfere in any way with governmental procedure or
with the course of justice; and standing with absolute firmness on the
powers granted by the charter and pointing to the recent renewal by the
King as a full confirmation of all their privileges, they denied the
validity of the royal mission and refused to discuss the question of
jurisdiction. The commissioners said very plainly that Massachusetts had
not administered the oath of allegiance or permitted the use of the Book
of Common Prayer, as she had promised to do, and, as for the new
franchise law, they did not understand it themselves and did not believe
it would meet the royal requirements. To none of these points did the
magistrates make any sufficient reply, but, feeling convinced that
safety lay in avoiding decisions, they preferred rather to leave the
matter ambiguous than to attempt any clearing up of the points at issue.
But when the commissioners took up the question of appeals and announced
their determination to sit as a court of justice, the issue was more
fairly joined. The magistrates quoted the text of the charter to show
that the colony had full power over all judicial affairs, while the
commissioners cited their instructions as a sufficient warrant for their
right to hear complaints against the colony. A deadlock ensued, but in
the end the colony triumphed. After spending a month in fruitless
negotiations, the commissioners gave up the struggle, preferring to
leave the conduct of Massachusetts to be passed upon by the Crown rather
than to prolong the controversy. For the time being, the Massachusetts
men had their own way; but they had raised a serious and dangerous
question, that of their allegiance and its obligations, for, as the
commissioners said, "The King did not grant away his soveraigntie over
you when he made you a corporation. When His Majestie gave you power to
make wholesome lawes and to administer justice, he parted not with his
right of judging whether those laws are wholsom, or whether justice was
administered accordingly or no. When His Majestie gave you authoritie
over such of his subjects as lived within the limits of your
jurisdiction, he made them not your subjects nor you their supream
authority." Had the magistrates been wiser men, less homebred and
provincial, and possessed of wider vision, they would have foreseen the
dangers that confronted them. But Bellingham and Leverett, the leading
representatives of the policy of no surrender, were not men gifted with
foresight, and they remained unmoved by the last threat of the
commissioners that it would be hazardous to deny the King's supremacy,
for "'tis possible that the charter which you so much idolize may be
forfeited."
The magistrates were undoubtedly influenced by the character of the
commissioners and their rough and ready methods of procedure. Had all
been as honorable and upright as Nicolls, who unfortunately took but
little part in the negotiations, the outcome might have been different.
But there is reason to think otherwise. The Massachusetts leaders took
the ground that if they yielded any part they must eventually yield all,
and they wanted no interference from outside in their government. Having
ruled themselves for thirty years as they thought best, they were not
disposed to admit that the King had any rights in the colony; and they
believed that by steady resistance or by dilatory practices they could
stave off intervention and that, with the danger once removed, the
colony would be allowed to continue in its own course. In a measure they
were justified in their belief. The King recalled the commissioners,
and, though he wrote a letter declaring that Massachusetts had shown a
great want of duty and respect for the royal authority, he went no
further than to command the colony to send agents to England to answer
there the questions that had not been settled during the stay of the
commissioners at Boston. But the colony did not take this command
seriously and sent no agents. Nicolls, always temperate in speech, wrote
in 1666: "The grandees of Boston are too proud to be dealt with, saying
that His Majesty is well satisfied with their loyalty."
The "grandees" were playing a shrewd but none too wise a game. Affairs
in England were not favorable to the pursuit of a rigorous policy at
this time. The Dutch war, the fire and epidemic in London, and the
consequent suspension of all outside activities, had thrown governmental
business into disorder and confusion. Clarendon, whose influence was
waning, was soon to lose his post as Chancellor. The negotiations which
ended in the treaty of Breda, and the threatening policy of Louis XIV,
now beginning to take a form ominous to the Protestant states of Europe,
distracted men's minds at home, and the Massachusetts problem was for
the moment lost sight of in the presence of the larger issues. The
colony returned to its former position of independence and soon
reasserted its former authority over New Hampshire and Maine. To all
appearances the failure of the royal commissioners was complete, but
appearances were deceptive. The issue lay not merely between a Stuart
King and a colony seeking to preserve its liberties; it was part of the
larger and more fundamental issue of the place of a colony in England's
newly developed policy of colonial subordination and control. Neither
was Massachusetts a persecuted democracy. No modern democratic state
would ever vest such powers in the hands of its magistrates and clergy,
nor would any modern people accept such oppressive and unjust
legislation as characterized these early New England communities. In any
case, the contemptuous attitude of Massachusetts and her disregard of
the royal commands were not forgotten; and when, a few years later, the
authorities in England took up in earnest the enforcement of the new
colonial policy as defined by acts of Parliament and royal orders and
proclamations, the colony of Massachusetts Bay was the first to feel the
weight of the royal displeasure.
CHAPTER VIII
WARS WITH THE INDIANS
The period from 1660 to 1675, a time of readjustment in the affairs of
the New England colonies, was characterized by widespread excitement and
deep concern on the part of the colonies everywhere. Scarcely a section
of the territory from Maine to the frontier of New York and the towns of
Long Island but felt the strain of impending change in its political
status. The winning of the charters and the capture of New Amsterdam
were momentous events in the lives of the colonists of Rhode Island and
Connecticut; while the agitation for the annexation of New Haven and the
acrimonious debate that accompanied it must have stirred profoundly the
towns of that colony and have led to local controversies, rivalries, and
contentions that kept the inhabitants in a continual state of
perturbation. On Long Island before 1664, the uncertainty as to
jurisdiction, due to grave doubts as to the meaning of Connecticut's
charter, aroused the towns from Easthampton and Southold on the east to
Flushing and Gravesend on the west, and divided the people into
discordant and clashing groups. Captain John Scott, already mentioned,
an adventurer and soldier of fortune who at one time or another seems to
have made trouble in nearly every part of the British world, appeared at
this time in Long Island and, denying Connecticut's title to the
territory, proclaimed the King. In January, 1664, he established a
government at Setauket, with himself as president. This event set the
towns in an uproar; Captain Young from Southold, upholding Connecticut's
claim, came "with a trumpet" to Hempstead; New Haven men crossed Long
Island Sound to support Scott's cause; and at last Connecticut herself
sent over officers to seize the insurgents. Though Scott said he would
"sacrifice his heart's blood upon the ground" before he would yield, he
was taken and carried in chains to Hartford.
Both Plymouth and Massachusetts sent letters protesting against the
treatment of Scott, and the heat engendered among the members of the New
England Confederation was intensified by the controversy over New Haven
and the "uncomfortable debates" regarding the title to the Narragansett
territory. Massachusetts wrote to Connecticut in 1662, "We cannot a
little wonder at your proceeding so suddenly to extend your authority to
the trouble of your friends and confederates"; to which Connecticut
replied, hoping that Massachusetts would stop laying further temptations
before "our subjects at Mistack of disobedience to this government." The
matter was debated for many years, and it was not until 1672 that
Massachusetts recognized Connecticut's title under the charter and
yielded, not because it thought the claim just but because "it was
judged by us more dangerous to the common cause of New England to oppose
than by our forbearance and yielding to endeavour to prevent a mischief
to us both."
In Rhode Island conditions were equally unsettled, for the inhabitants
of the border towns did not know certainly in what colony they were
situated or what authority to recognize; and though these doubts
affected but little the daily life of the farmer, they did affect the
title to his lands and the payment of his taxes, and threw suspicion
upon all legal processes and transactions. The situation was even more
disturbed in the regions north of Massachusetts, where the status of
Maine and New Hampshire was undecided and where the coming of the royal
commissioners only served to throw the inhabitants into a new ferment.
The claims of Mason and Gorges were revived by their descendants, and
the King peremptorily ordered Massachusetts to surrender the provinces.
Agents of Gorges appeared in the territory and demanded an
acknowledgment of their authority; the commissioners themselves
attempted to organize a government and to exercise jurisdiction there in
the King's name; but in 1668 Massachusetts, denying all other
pretensions, adopted a resolution asserting her full right of control,
and, sending commissioners with a military escort to York, resumed
jurisdiction of the province. The inhabitants did not know what to do.
Some upheld the Gorges agents and the commissioners; others adhered to
Massachusetts. Even in Massachusetts itself there were grave differences
of opinion, for the younger generation did not always follow the old
magistrates, and the people of Boston were developing views both of
government and of the proper relations toward England that were at
variance with those of the more conservative country towns and
districts.
The larger disputes between the colonies were frequently accompanied
with lesser disputes between the towns over their boundaries; and both
at this time and for years afterwards there was scarcely an important
settlement in New England that did not have some trouble with its
neighbor. In 1666 Stamford and Greenwich came to blows over their
dividing line, and in 1672 men from New London and Lyme attempted to mow
the same piece of meadow and had a pitched battle with clubs and
scythes. Not many years later the inhabitants of Windsor and Enfield
"were so fiercely engag'd" over a disputed strip of land, reported an
eye-witness, that a hundred men met to decide this controversy by force,
"a resolute combat" ensuing between them "in which many blows were given
to the exasperating each party, so that the lives and limbs of his
Majesties subjects were endangered thereby."
Though clubs and scythes and fists are dangerous weapons enough, the
only real fighting in which the colonists engaged was with the Indians
and with weapons consisting of pikes and muskets. Indian attacks were an
ever-present danger, for the stretches of unoccupied land between the
colonies were the hunting-grounds of the Narragansetts of eastern
Connecticut and western Rhode Island, the Pequots of Connecticut, the
Wampanoags of Plymouth and its neighborhood, the Pennacooks of New
Hampshire, and the Abenaki tribes of Maine. Plague and starvation had so
far weakened the coast Indians before the arrival of the first colonists
that the new settlements had been but little disturbed; but,
unfortunately, as the first comers pushed into the interior, founding
new plantations, felling trees, and clearing the soil, and the trappers
and traders invaded the Indian hunting-grounds, carrying with them
firearms and liquor, the Indian menace became serious.
To meet the Indian peril, all the colonies made provision for a supply
of arms and for the drilling of the citizen body in militia companies or
train-bands. But in equipment, discipline, and morale the fighting force
of New England was very imperfect. The troops had no uniforms; there was
a very inadequate commissariat; and alarums, whether by beacon,
drum-beat, or discharge of guns, were slow and unreliable. Weapons were
crude, and the method of handling them was exceedingly awkward and
cumbersome. The pike was early abandoned and the matchlock soon gave
way to the flintlock--both heavy and unwieldy instruments of war--and
carbines and pistols were also used. Cavalry or mounted infantry, though
expensive because of horse and outfit, were introduced whenever
possible. In 1675, Plymouth had fourteen companies of infantry and
cavalry; Massachusetts had six regiments, including the Ancient and
Honorable Artillery; and Maine and New Hampshire had one each.
Connecticut had four train-bands in 1662 and nine in 1668, a troop of
dragoneers, and a troop of horse, but no regiments until the next
century. For coast defense there were forts, very inadequately supplied
with ordnance, of which that on Castle Island in Boston harbor was the
most conspicuous, and, for the frontier, there were garrison-houses and
stockades.
Though Massachusetts had twice put herself in readiness to repel
attempts at coercion from England, and though both Connecticut and New
Haven seemed on several occasions in danger from the Dutch, particularly
after the recapture of New Amsterdam in 1673, New England's chief danger
was always from the Indians. Both French and Dutch were believed to be
instrumental in inciting Indian warfare, one along the southwestern
border, the other at various points in the north, notably in New
Hampshire and Maine. But, except for occasional Indian forays and for
house-burnings and scalpings in the more remote districts, there were
only two serious wars in the seventeenth century--that against the
Pequots in 1637 and the great War of King Philip in 1675-1676.
The Pequot War, which was carried on by Connecticut with a few men from
Massachusetts and a number of Mohegan allies, ended in the complete
overthrow of the Pequot nation and the extermination of nearly all its
fighting force. It began in June, 1637, with the successful attack by
Captain John Mason on the Pequot fort near Groton, and was brought to an
end by the battle of Fairfield Swamp, July 13, where the surviving
Pequots made their last stand. Sassacus, the Pequot chieftain, was
murdered by the Mohawks, among whom he had sought refuge; and during the
year that followed wandering members of the tribe, whenever found, were
slain by their enemies, the Mohegans and Narragansetts. An entire Indian
people was wiped out of existence, an achievement difficult to justify
on any ground save that of the extreme necessity of either slaying or
being slain. The relentless pursuit of the scattered and dispirited
remnants of these tribes admits of little defense.
The overthrow of the Pequots opened to settlement the region from
Saybrook to Mystic and led to a treaty in 1638 with the Mohegans and
Narragansetts, according to which harmony was to prevail and peace was
to reign. But the outcome of this impracticable treaty was a five years'
struggle between the Mohegan chieftain, Uncas, actively allied with the
colony of Connecticut, and Miantonomo, sachem of the Narragansetts,
which involved Connecticut in a tortuous and often dishonorable policy
of attempting to divide the Indians in order to rule them--a policy
which led to many embarrassing negotiations and bloody conflicts and
ended in the murder of Miantonomo in 1643, by the Mohegans, at the
instigation of the commissioners of the United Colonies. This alliance
between Uncas and the colony lasted for more than forty years. It placed
upon Connecticut the burden of supporting a treacherous and grasping
Indian chief; it created a great deal of confusion in land titles in the
eastern part of the colony because of indiscriminate Indian grants; it
started the famous Mohegan controversy which agitated the colony and
England also, and was not finally settled until 1773, one hundred and
thirty years later; and it was, in part at least, a cause of King
Philip's War, because of the colony's support of the Mohegans against
their traditional enemies, the Narragansetts and Niantics.
The presence of the Indians in and near the colonies rendered frequent
dealings with them a matter of necessity. The English settlers generally
purchased their lands from the Indians, paying in such goods or
implements or trinkets as satisfied savage need and desire. In so doing
they acquired, as they supposed, a clear title of ownership, though
there can be no doubt that what the Indian thought he sold was not the
actual soil but only the right to occupy the land in common with
himself. As the years wore on, the problems of reservations, trade, and
the sale of firearms and liquor engaged the attention of the authorities
and led to the passage of many laws. The conversion of the Indians to
Christianity became the object of many pious efforts, and in
Massachusetts and Plymouth resulted in communities of "Praying Indians,"
estimated in 1675 at about four thousand individuals. In contact with
the white man the Indian tended to deteriorate. He frequented the
settlements often to the annoyance of the men and the dread of the women
and children; he got into debt, was incurably slothful and idle, and
developed an uncontrollable desire to drink and steal. Where the Indians
were not a menace, they were a nuisance, and the colonies passed many
laws concerning the Indians which were designed to meet the one
condition as well as the other.
But the real danger to New England came not from those Indians who
occupied reservations and hung around the settlements, but from those
who, with savage spirit unbroken, were slowly being driven from their
hunting-grounds and nurtured an implacable hatred against the aggressive
and relentless pioneers. The New Englanders numbered at this time some
80,000 individuals, with an adult and fighting population of perhaps
16,000; while the number of the Indians altogether may have reached as
high as 12,000, with the Narragansetts, the strongest of all, mustering
4,000. The final struggle for possession of the main part of central and
southern New England territory came in 1675, in what is known as King
Philip's War.
Scarcely had the fears aroused by the arrival of a Dutch fleet at New
York and the capture of that city been allayed by the peace of
Westminster in 1674, when rumors of Indian unrest began to spread
through the settlements, and the dread of Indian outbreaks began to
arouse new apprehensions in the hearts of the people. Hitherto no Indian
chieftain had proved himself a born leader of his people. Neither
Sessaquem, Sassacus, Pumham, Uncas, nor Miantonomo had been able to
quiet tribal jealousies and draw to his standard against the English
others than his own immediate followers. But now appeared a sachem who
was the equal of any in hatred of the white man and the superior of all
in generalship, who was gifted both with the power of appeal to the
younger Indians and with the finesse required to rouse other chieftains
to a war of vengeance. Philip, or Metacom, was the second son of old
Massasoit, the longtime friend of the English, and, upon the death of
his elder brother Alexander in 1662, became the head of the Wampanoags,
with his seat at Mount Hope, a promontory extending into Narragansett
Bay. Believing that his people had been wronged by the English,
particularly by those of Plymouth colony, and foreseeing that he and
his people were to be driven step by step westward into narrower and
more restricted quarters, he began to plot a great campaign of
extermination. On June 24, 1675, a body of Indians fell on the town of
Swansea, on the eastern side of Narragansett Bay, slew nine of the
inhabitants and wounded seven others. Though assistance was sent from
Massachusetts and Plymouth, the burning and massacring continued,
extending to Rehoboth, Taunton, and towns northward. The settlements
were isolated before the troops could reach them, their inhabitants were
slain, cabins were burned, and prisoners were carried into captivity.
The Rhode Islanders fled to the islands; elsewhere settlers gathered in
garrisoned forts and blockhouses and in new forts hastily erected.
Though the authorities of Connecticut and Massachusetts sent agents
among the Nipmucks hoping to prevent their alliance with Philip, the
effort failed, and by August the tribes on the upper Connecticut had
joined the movement and now began a determined and systematic
destruction of the settlements in central New England. The famous
massacre and burning of Deerfield took place on September 12, the
surviving inhabitants fleeing to Hatfield, leaving their town in ruins.
Hatfield, Northfield, Springfield, and Westfield were attacked in turn,
and though the defense was sometimes successful, more often the
defenders were ambushed and killed. So widespread was the uprising that
during the autumn, a desultory warfare was carried on as far north as
Falmouth, Brunswick, and Casco Bay, where at least fifty Englishmen were
slain by members of the Saco and Androscoggin tribes.
As yet the Narragansetts, bravest of all the southern New England
Indians, whose chief was Canonchet, son of the murdered Miantonomo, had
taken no part in the war. But as rumor spread that they had welcomed
Philip and listened to his appeals and were probably planning to join in
the murderous fray, war was declared against them on November 2, 1675,
and a force of a thousand men and horse from Plymouth and Massachusetts
was drawn up on Dedham plain, under the command of General Josiah
Winslow and Captain Benjamin Church. On December 19, the greater part of
this force, aided by troops from Connecticut, fell on the Narragansetts
in their swamp fort, south of the present town of Kingston, and after a
fierce and bloody fight completely routed them, though at a heavy loss.
The tribe was driven from its own territory, and Canonchet fled to the
Connecticut River, where he established a rallying point for new forays.
His followers allied themselves with the Wampanoags and Nipmucks and
began a new series of massacres. In February and March, 1676, they fell
upon Lancaster, where they carried off Mrs. Rowlandson, who has left us
a narrative of her captivity; upon Medfield, where fifty houses were
burned; and upon Weymouth and Marlborough, which were raided and in part
destroyed. Repeated assaults in other quarters kept the western frontier
of Massachusetts in a frightful condition of terror; settlers were
ambushed and scalped, others were tortured, and many were carried into
captivity. Even the Pennacooks of southern New Hampshire were roused to
action, though their share in the war was small. Here a hundred warriors
sacked a village; there Indians skulking along trails and on the
outskirts of towns cut off individuals and groups of individuals,
shooting, scalping, and burning them. No one was safe. Again the
commissioners of the United Colonies met in council and ordered a more
vigorous prosecution of the campaign. More troops were levied and
garrison posts fortified, but the first results were disastrous.
Captain Pierce of Scituate was ambushed at Blackstone's River near
Rehoboth, and his command was completely wiped out. Sudbury was
destroyed in April, and a relieving force escaped only with heavy loss.
But the strength of the Indians was waning. Canonchet, run to earth near
the Pawtuxet River, was captured and sentenced to death, and his
execution was entrusted to Oneko, the son of Uncas. His head was cut off
and carried to Hartford, and his body was committed to the flames. The
loss of Canonchet was a bitter blow to Philip, who now saw his allies
falling away and himself deserted by all but a few faithful followers.
The campaign--at last well in hand and directed by that prince of Indian
fighters, Benjamin Church, now commissioned a colonel by General
Winslow--was approaching an end. Using friendly savages as scouts,
Colonel Church gradually located and captured stray bodies of Indians
and brought them as captives to Plymouth. Finally, coming on the trail
of Philip himself, he first intercepted his followers, and then,
relentlessly pursuing the fleeing chieftain from one point to another,
tracked him to his lair at his old stronghold, Mount Hope. There the
great chief who had terrorized New England for nearly a year was slain
by one of his own race. His ornaments and treasure were seized by the
soldiers, and his crown, gorget, and two belts, all of gold and silver
of Indian make, were sent as a present to Charles II. With the death of
Philip, August 12, 1676, the whole movement collapsed, and the remaining
hostile Indians, dispersed and in flight, with their leaders gone and
starvation threatening, sought refuge among the northern tribes. Thus
the last effort to check the English advance in southern and central New
England was brought to an end. From this time on, the Indians in
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut lingered for a century and
a half, a steadily dwindling remnant, wards of the governments and
occupants of reservations, until they ceased to exist as a separate
people.
The havoc wrought by the war was a great blow to the prosperity of New
England. Probably more than six hundred whites had been slain or
captured, and hundreds of houses and a score of villages had been burnt
or pillaged; crops had been destroyed, cattle driven off, and
agriculture in many quarters brought to a complete standstill. In 1676,
there was little leisure to sow and less to reap. Provisions became
increasingly scarce; none could be had near at hand, for none of the
colonies had a surplus; and attempts to obtain them from a distance
proved unavailing. Staples for trade with the West Indies decreased; the
fur trade was curtailed; and fishing was hampered for want of men. To
add to the confusion, a plague vexed the colonies. It seemed to all as
if the hand of God lay heavily upon New England, and days of humiliation
and prayer were appointed to assuage the wrath of the Almighty. A
Massachusetts act of November, 1675, ascribed the war to the judgment of
God upon the colony for its sins, among which were included an excess of
apparel, the wearing of long hair, and the rudeness of worship, all
marks of an apostasy from the Lord "with a great backsliding." The
Puritan fear of divine displeasure adds a relieving note to the general
despondency and must have stiffened the determination of the orthodox
leaders to resist to the utmost all attempts to liberalize the life of
the colony or to alter its character as a religious state patterned
after the divine plan. King Philip's War probably strengthened the
position of the conservative element in Massachusetts.
CHAPTER IX
THE BAY COLONY DISCIPLINED
Except for the northern frontier, where Indian forays and atrocities
continued for many years longer, the last great struggle with the
Indians in New England was finished. The next danger came from a
different quarter and in a different form. In June, 1676, two months
before the Indian War was over, one Edward Randolph arrived from England
to make an inquiry into the affairs of Massachusetts. That colony had
scarcely weathered the ever-threatening peril of the New World when it
was called upon to face an attack from the Old which endangered the
continuance of those precious privileges for which the magistrates at
Boston had contended with a vigor shrewd rather than wise. As we have
seen, the position that Massachusetts assumed as a colony largely
independent of British control was incompatible with England's colonial
and commercial policy, a position that was certain to be called in
question as soon as the authorities at home were able to give serious
attention to it.
This opportunity did not arrive until, in 1674, the plantations council
was dismissed, and colonial business was handed over to the Privy
Council and placed in the hands of a standing committee of that body
known as the Lords of Trade. This committee, which was more dignified
and authoritative than had been the old council, at once assumed a
firmer tone toward the colonies. It caused a proclamation to be issued
announcing the royal determination to enforce the acts of trade, and it
made the King's will known in America by means of new instructions to
the royal governors there. It stated clearly the purpose of the
Government to bring the colonies into a position of greater dependence
on the Crown in the interest of the trade and revenues of the kingdom,
and it showed no inclination to grant Massachusetts, with all the
charges and complaints against her, preferential treatment. At the same
time it was not disposed to pay much attention to religious differences,
minor misdemeanors, and neighborhood quarrels, if only the colony would
conform to British policy in all that concerned the royal prerogative
and the authority of Parliament; but it made it perfectly plain that
continued infractions of parliamentary acts and royal commands would not
be condoned.
Had the leaders of Massachusetts been more complaisant and less given to
a policy of evasion and delay, it is not unlikely that the colony would
have been allowed to retain its privileges; and had they been less
absorbed in themselves and more observant of the world outside, they
might have seen the changes that were coming over the temper and purpose
of those in England who were shaping the relations between England and
her colonies. But Massachusetts had grown provincial since the
Restoration, looking backward rather than forward and moving in very
narrow channels of thought and life, so that she was wrapped up in
matters of purely local interest. The clergy were struggling to maintain
their control in colony and college, while the deputies in the
legislature, representing in the main the conservative country
districts, were upholding the clerical party against some of the
magistrates, who represented the town of Boston and were inclined to
take a more liberal and progressive view of the matter. These country
members saw in England's attitude only the desire of a despotic Stuart
régime to suppress the liberties of a Puritan commonwealth, and failed
to see that the investigation into the affairs of Massachusetts was but
an effort to establish a colonial policy fundamental to England's
welfare and power.
It cannot be said that, from 1660 to 1684, the Government in England
displayed undue animus toward the colony. It allowed Massachusetts to do
a great many things that in law she had no right to do, such as coining
money and issuing a charter to Harvard College. Its demand for a
broadening of the Massachusetts franchise was in the interest of liberty
and not against it, and the insistence on freedom of worship deserves no
reproof. Its condemnation of many of the Massachusetts laws as
oppressive and unjust shows that in some respects legal opinion in
England at this time was more advanced than that in Massachusetts and
Connecticut, and, even at its worst, English law did not go to the
Mosaic code for its precedents. There is a distinct note of cruelty and
oppression in some of the Massachusetts and Connecticut legislation at
this time, and many of the Puritan measures were harsh and arbitrary and
liable to abuse. Even the Government's support of the Mason and Gorges
claims was not dishonorable, and while it may have been unwise and, in
equity, unjust, it was not without excuse. The Government listened to
complaints of persecution, as any sovereign power is required to do, and
was naturally impressed with the weightiness of some of the charges; yet
so little inclined was it to tamper with Massachusetts that the colony
might have succeeded, for a longer time at least, in maintaining the
integrity of its control, had not the question of colonial trade brought
matters to a crisis.
Under Charles II, finances presented a difficult problem, for Parliament
in controlling appropriations took no responsibility for the collection
of money granted. To meet the deficit which during the earlier years of
the reign was ever present, efforts were made to increase the revenue
from customs, and so successful was this policy that, after 1675, these
customs revenues came to be looked upon as among England's greatest
sources of wealth. Now, inasmuch as trade with the colonies was one of
the largest factors contributing to this result, England, as she could
not afford to maintain colonies that would do nothing to aid her, came
more and more to value her overseas possessions for their commercial
importance, classing as valuable assets those that advanced her
prosperity, and treating as insubordinate those that disregarded the
acts of trade and thwarted her policy. The independence that
Massachusetts claimed was diametrically opposed to the growing English
notion that a colony should be subordinate and dependent, should obey
the acts of trade and navigation, and should recognize the authority of
the Crown; and, from what they heard of the temper of New England,
English statesmen suspected that Massachusetts was doing none of these
things.
Edward Randolph, who was sent over in 1676 to make inquiry into the
affairs of the colony, was a native of Canterbury, a former student of
Gray's Inn, and at this time forty-three years old. The fact that he was
connected by marriage with the Mason family accounts for his interest in
the efforts of Gorges and Mason to break the hold of Massachusetts upon
New Hampshire and Maine. He was a personal acquaintance of Sir Robert
Southwell, the diplomatist, and of Southwell's intimate friend, William
Blathwayt, an influential English official interested in the colonies.
He had been in the employ of the government, and now, probably at the
instance of Southwell and Blathwayt, he was selected to fill the
difficult and thankless post of commissioner to New England. That he had
ability and courage no one can doubt, and that he pursued his course
with a tenacity that would have won commendation in other and less
controversial fields, his career shows. His devotion to the interests of
the Crown and his loyalty to the Church of England steeled him against
the almost incessant attacks and rebuffs that he was called upon to
endure, and his entire inability to see any other cause than his own
saved him from the discouragements that must certainly have broken a man
more sensitive than himself. He exhibited at times some of the obduracy
of the zealot and martyr; at others he displayed unexpected good sense
in protesting against extremes of action that he thought unjust or
unwise. He was honest and indefatigable in the pursuit of what he
believed to be his duty, and was ill-requited for his labors, but he was
a persistent fault-finder and his letters are masterpieces of complaint.
He was thrice married, his second wife dying at the height of his
troubles in Massachusetts, and he had five children, all daughters, one
of whom proved a grievous disappointment to him. Though he held many
offices, he was always in debt and died poor, at the age of seventy, in
Accomac County in Virginia. He was far from being the best man to send
to New England, but his natural obstinacy and his determination to
overcome difficulties were intensified by the discourteous and tactless
manner in which he was received by the Puritans. He had no sympathy with
the efforts of the "old faction" to save the colony, and the people of
Massachusetts responded with a bitter and lasting hate.
Randolph landed at Boston on June 10, and remained in the colony until
the end of July, about six weeks altogether. He visited Plymouth, New
Hampshire, and Maine, interviewed men in authority and all sorts of
other people, and he came to the conclusion that the majority of the
inhabitants were discontented with the Boston régime. The magistrates
ignored his presence as much as they dared, refusing to recognize him as
anything but an enemy representing the Mason and Gorges claims, and
insisting that though the King might enlarge their privileges he could
not abridge them. Randolph, thoroughly nettled, returned to England
prepared to do his worst. He sent several reports to the King and
constantly appeared before the Privy Council and the Lords of Trade,
each time doing all the damage that he could. He had undoubtedly got
much of his information from prejudiced sources or from hearsay, and he
was as eager to retail it as had been the Massachusetts authorities to
blast the moral character of the King's commissioners. He denounced the
"old faction" as cunning, deceptive, overbearing, and disloyal; he
called the clergy proud, ignorant, imperious, and inclined to sedition;
and he denounced those in authority as "inconsiderable mechanicks,
packed by the prevailing party of the factious ministry, with a
fellow-feeling both in the command and the profits." His picture of the
colony, containing much that was near the truth, was at the same time
distorted, out of proportion, and in parts almost a caricature. His most
effective reports were those which laid stress upon the failure of the
colony to obey the navigation acts and the royal commands, and upon its
use of the word "Commonwealth," as if the corporation were already an
independent state. These reports were accepted by the English
authorities as correct statements of fact, for they seemed to be
confirmed by the evidence of London merchants and by at least one West
Indian governor, who knew the colony and had no personal interests at
stake.
In October, 1676, Massachusetts sent over two of its leading men,
William Stoughton, a magistrate, and Peter Bulkeley, speaker of the
House of Representatives, to ward off, if possible, the attack on the
colony, but with characteristic short-sightedness gave them no authority
to discuss officially anything but the Mason and Gorges claims. For more
than two years these men, representative rather of the moderate party
than of the "old faction" in the colony, remained in England, frequently
appearing before the Lords of Trade, where they were subjected to a
searching examination at the hands of a not very sympathetic body of
men. The meetings in the Council Chamber in Whitehall, where the
committee sat, were occasions full of interest and excitement. At one of
them, on April 8, 1677, Stoughton, Bulkeley, Randolph, Mason, and Sir
Edmund Andros, Governor of New York for the Duke, were all present, and
the agents must have found the situation awkward and embarrassing. The
committee expressed its resentment at the colony's habit of disobedience
and evasion, and showed no inclination to adopt a moderate policy,
advocating, on the contrary, investigation "from the whole root." The
position of a Massachusetts agent in England during these trying years
was most undesirable, and so many difficulties and discouragements did
Stoughton and Bulkeley encounter that several times they asked for
permission to return home and once, at least, had to go to the country
for their health. But whatever were the troubles of an agent in England,
they were trifling as compared with those which confronted him at home
when he failed, as he almost invariably did fail, to obtain all that the
colony expected. Cotton Mather tells us that Norton died in 1663 of
melancholy and chagrin, and that for forty years there was not one agent
but met "with some very froward entertainment among his countrymen." No
wonder it was always difficult to find men who were willing to go.
At first the Lords of Trade favored the sending of a supplemental
charter and the extending of a pardon to the colony; but as the evidence
against Massachusetts accumulated, they began to consider the revision
of the laws, the appointment of a collector of customs and a royal
governor, and even the annulment of the charter itself. In short, they
determined to bring Massachusetts "under a more palpable declaration of
obedience to his Majesty." The general court of the colony, although it
had said that "any breach in the wall would endanger the whole," was at
last frightened by the news from England and passed an order in October,
1677, that the laws of trade must be strictly observed, and later
magistrates and deputies alike took the oath of allegiance prescribed by
the Crown, promising to drop the word "Commonwealth" for the future. The
members of the assembly wrote an amazing letter, pietistic and cringing,
in which they prostrated themselves before the King, asked to be
numbered among his "poore yet humble and loyal subjects," and begged for
a renewal of all their privileges. At best such a letter could have done
little in England to increase respect for the colony, but any good
results expected from it were completely destroyed by the serious
blunder which the colony made at this time in purchasing from the Gorges
claimants the title to the province of Maine, which with New Hampshire
had recently been declared by the chief justices of the King's Bench and
Common Pleas to lie outside of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. This
attempt to obtain, without the royal consent, a territory which the
legal advisers of the Crown had decided Massachusetts could not have,
only strengthened the determination of the authorities in England to
bring the colony into the King's hand by the appointment of a royal
governor. For the moment, however, the uprising of Bacon in Virginia and
the Popish Plot in England so distracted the Government that it was
obliged to slight or to postpone much of its business. It did succeed in
settling the perplexing question of New Hampshire, for, having obtained
from Mason a renunciation of all his claims to the Government, though
leaving him with full title to the soil, it organized that territory as
a colony under the control of the Crown.
With these matters out of the way or less exigent, the Lords of Trade
returned to the affairs of New England. They wished, before proceeding
to extremes, to give Massachusetts another chance to be heard; so, in
dismissing the agents in the autumn of 1679, they instructed the colony
to send over within six months others fully prepared "to answer the
misdemeanors imputed against them." They also decided to send Randolph
back as collector and surveyor of customs, with letters to all the New
England colonies, ordering them to enforce the acts of trade, and
another to Massachusetts requiring that she provide a minister for those
in Boston who wished an Anglican church. Randolph, who left for New
England for the second time, in December, 1679, has the distinction of
being the first royal official appointed for any of the northern
colonies. Almost his first task was to settle the province of New
Hampshire under royal authority, with a government consisting of a
president, a council, and an assembly. Thus British control in New
England was making progress, and the worst fears of the "old faction" in
Massachusetts were being realized.
It is difficult to understand the attitude of Massachusetts. Her leaders
probably thought that with the settlement of the Mason and Gorges claims
the most serious source of trouble with England was disposed of. They
believed, honestly enough, though the wish was father to the thought,
that the colony lay beyond the reach of Parliament and that the laws of
England were bounded by the four seas and did not reach America. Hence
they deemed the navigation acts an invasion of their liberties and could
not bring themselves to obey them. As to England's new colonial policy,
it is doubtful if they grasped it at all, or would have acknowledged it
as applicable to themselves, even if they had understood it. The
experiences and reports of their agents in England seem to have taught
them nothing and served only to confirm their belief that a Stuart was a
tyrant and that all English authorities were natural enemies. They had
labored and suffered in the vineyard of the Lord and they wished to be
let alone to enjoy their dearly won privileges. Randolph wrote, soon
after his arrival in New England, that the colony was acting "as high as
ever," and that "it was in every one's mouth that they are not subject
to the laws of England nor were such laws in force until confirmed by
their authority." The colony neglected to send the agents demanded,
alleging expense, the dangers of the sea, the difficulty of finding any
one to accept the post, and their belief that King and council were
"taken up with matters of greater importance," until finally in
September, 1680, the King wrote an exceedingly sharp letter, calling the
excuses "insufficient pretences," and commanding that agents be sent
within three months. Strange to say the colony even then allowed a year
to elapse before complying, and again instructed those whom they sent to
agree to nothing that concerned the charter.
Before the agents arrived in the summer of 1682, the royal patience was
exhausted. Randolph's continued complaints that he was obstructed in
every way in the performance of his duties; the act of the colony in
setting up a naval office of its own; the revival of an old law imposing
the death penalty upon any one who should "attempt the alteration or
subversion of the frame of government"; the opinion of the
Attorney-General that the colony had done quite enough to warrant the
forfeiture of its charter; and the delay in sending the agents, which
seemed a further flouting of the royal commands--all these things
brought matters to a crisis. Therefore, when finally the Massachusetts
agents reached England, they found the situation hopeless. "It is a hard
service we are engaged in," they wrote; "we stand in need of help from
Heaven." Their want of powers provoked the Lords of Trade to say that
unless they were procured, the charter would be forfeited at once.
Randolph was called back in May, 1683, to aid in the legal proceedings
which were immediately set on foot. Other charters were falling: that of
the Bermuda Company was under attack; that of the City of London was
already forfeited; and those of other English boroughs were in danger.
On June 27, a writ of _quo warranto_ was issued out of the Court of
King's Bench against the colony. The agents, refusing to defend the
suit, returned to New England, and the writ was given to Randolph to
serve. He reached Boston in October, but owing to delays in the colony
and a tempestuous voyage back, he was unable to return it to England
within the allotted time. The first attempt failed, but another was soon
made. By the advice of the Attorney-General, suit was brought in the
Court of Chancery by writ of _scire facias_ against the company, and
upon the rendering of judgment for non-appearance the charter was
declared forfeited on October 23, 1684.
Though the colony was given no opportunity to defend the suit, the
charter was legally vacated according to the forms of English law. The
colony was but a corporation, its charter but a corporation charter, and
in only one respect did it differ from other corporations, namely, its
residence in America. The methods of vacating corporate charters in
England were definite and in this case were strictly followed. Had
Massachusetts been a corporation in fact as well as in law, it is
doubtful if the question of illegality would ever have been raised; but
as this particular corporation was a Puritan commonwealth, the issue was
so vital to its continuance as to lead to the charge of unjust and
illegal oppression. On moral grounds a defence of the colony is always
possible, though it is difficult to uphold the Massachusetts system. It
was certainly neither popular nor democratic, tolerant nor progressive,
and in any case it must eventually have undergone transformation from
within. The city of Boston was increasing in wealth and importance, and
trade was bringing it into ever closer contact with the outside world.
There were growing up in the colony more open-minded and progressive men
who were opposing the dominance of the country party, which found its
last governor in Leverett, its chief advocates among the clergy, and its
strength in the House of Representatives, and which wished to preserve
things as they always had been. The leaders of this conservative party,
Danforth, Nowell, Cooke, and others, struggled courageously against all
concessions, but they were bound to be beaten in the end.
That the conservative members of the colony were thoroughly in earnest
and thoroughly convinced of the absolute righteousness of their
position, admits of no doubt. No man could speak of the loss of the
charter as a breach in the "Hedge which kept us from the Wild Beasts of
the Field," as did Cotton Mather, without expressing a fear of a Stuart,
of an Anglican, and of a Papist that was as real as the terrors of
witchcraft. To the orthodox Puritans, the preservation of their
religious doctrines and government and the maintenance of their moral
and social standards were a duty to God, and to admit change was a sin
against the divine command. But such an unyielding system could not
last; in fact, it was already giving way. Though conjecture is
difficult, it seems likely that the English interference delayed rather
than hastened the natural growth and transformation of the colony,
because it united moderates and irreconcilables against a common
enemy--the authority of the Crown.
CHAPTER X
THE ANDROS RÉGIME IN NEW ENGLAND
Without a charter Massachusetts stood bereft of her privileges and at
the mercy of the royal will. She was now a royal colony, immediately
under the control of the Crown and likely to receive a royal governor
and a royal administration, as had other royal colonies. But the actual
form that reconstruction took in New England was peculiar and rendered
the conditions there unlike those in any other royal colony in America.
The territory was enlarged by including New Hampshire, which was already
in the King's hands, Plymouth, which was at the King's mercy because it
had no charter, Maine, and the Narragansett country. Eventually there
were added Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and the Jerseys--eight
colonies in all, a veritable British dominion beyond the seas. For its
Governor, Colonel Percy Kirke, recently returned from Tangier, was
considered, but Randolph, whose advice was asked, knowing that a man
like Kirke, "short-tempered, rough-spoken, and dissolute," would not
succeed, urged that his name be withdrawn. It was agreed that the
Governor should have a council, and at first the Lords of Trade
recommended a popular assembly, whenever the Governor saw fit; but in
this important particular they were overborne by the Crown. After debate
in a cabinet council, it was determined "not to subject the Governor and
council to convoke general assemblies of the people, for the purpose of
laying on taxes and regulating other matters of importance." This
unfortunate decision was a characteristic Stuart blunder for which the
Duke of York (afterwards James II), Lord Jeffreys (not yet Lord
Chancellor), and other ministers were responsible. Kirke, Jeffreys, and
the Duke of York may well have seemed to Cotton Mather "Wild Beasts of
the Field," dangerous to be entrusted with the shaping of the affairs of
a Puritan commonwealth.
The death of Charles II in February, 1685, postponed action in England,
and in Massachusetts the government went on as usual, the elections
taking place and deputies meeting, though with manifest
half-heartedness. Randolph was able to prevent the sending of Kirke,
and finally succeeded in persuading the authorities that it would be a
good plan to set up a temporary government, while they were making up
their minds whom to appoint as a permanent governor-general of the new
dominion. He obtained a commission as President for Joseph Dudley, son
of the former Governor, an ambitious man, with little sympathy for the
old faction and friendly to the idea of broadening the life of the
colony by fostering closer relations with England. Randolph himself
received an appointment as register and secretary of the colony, and for
once in his life seemed riding to fortune on the high tide of
prosperity. In 1685, he obtained nearly £500 for his services and for
his losses up to that date; and when the following January he started on
his fifth voyage to New England, he bore with him not only the judgment
against the charter, the commission to Dudley as President, and two
writs of _quo warranto_ against Connecticut and Rhode Island, but also a
sheaf of offices for himself--secretary, postmaster, collector of
customs. He was later to become deputy-auditor and surveyor of the
woods. With him went also the Reverend Robert Ratcliffe, rector of the
first Anglican church set up in Boston. Just a week after the arrival
of Randolph and Ratcliffe in Boston, the old assembly met for the last
time, and on May 21, 1686, voted its adjournment with the pious hope,
destined to be unfulfilled, that it would meet again the following
October. The Massachusetts leaders seem almost to have believed in a
miraculous intervention of Providence to thwart the purposes of their
enemy.
The preliminary government lasted but six months and altered the life of
the people but little. For "Governor and Company" was substituted
"President and Council," a more modish name, as some one said, but not
necessarily one that savored of despotism. But however conciliatory
Dudley might wish to be, his acceptance of a royal commission rankled in
the minds of his countrymen; and his ability, his friendly policy, his
desire to leave things pretty much as they had been, counted for nothing
because of his compact with the enemy. In the opinion of the old guard,
he had forsaken his birthright and had turned traitor to the land of his
origin. Time has modified this judgment and has shown that, however
unlovely Dudley was in personal character and however lacking he was at
all times in self-control, he was an able administrator, of a type
common enough in other colonies, particularly in the next century,
serving both colony and mother country alike and linking the two in a
common bond. Under him and his council Massachusetts suffered no
hardships. He confirmed all existing arrangements regarding land, taxes,
and town organization, and, knowing Massachusetts and the temper of her
people as well as he did, he took pains to write to the King that it
would be helpful to all concerned if the Government could have a
representative assembly. To grant the people a share in government
would, he believed, appease discontent on one side and help to fill an
empty treasury on the other; but nothing came of his suggestion.
Throughout New England as a whole, the daily routine of life was pursued
without regard to the particular form of government established in
Boston. In Massachusetts the election of deputies stopped, but in other
respects the town meetings carried on their usual business. In other
colonies no changes whatever took place. Men tilled the soil, went to
church, gathered in town meetings, and ordered their ordinary affairs as
they had done for half a century. The seaports felt the change more
than did the inland towns, for the enforcement of the navigation acts
interfered somewhat with the old channels of trade and led to the
introduction of a court of vice-admiralty which Dudley held for the
first time in July to try ships engaged in illicit trade. Over the forts
and the royal offices fluttered a new flag, bearing a St. George's cross
on a white field, with the initials J. R. and a crown embroidered in
gold in the center of the cross, that same cross which Endecott had cut
from the flag half a century before. To many the new flag was the symbol
of anti-Christ, and Cotton Mather judged it a sin to have the cross
restored; but others felt with Sewall, the diarist, who said of the fall
of the old government: "The foundations being destroyed, what can the
righteous do?"
Perhaps the greatest innovation--in any case, the novelty that aroused
the largest amount of curiosity and excitement--was the service
according to the Book of Common Prayer, held at first in the library
room of the Town House, and afterwards by arrangement in the South
Church, and conducted by the Reverend Robert Ratcliffe in a surplice,
before a congregation composed not only of professed Anglicans but also
of many men of Boston who had never before seen the Church of England
form of worship. The Anglican rector, by his somewhat unfortunate habit
of running over the time allowance and keeping the waiting
Congregationalists from entering their own church for the enjoyment of
their own form of worship, caused almost as much discontent as did the
dancing-master of whom the ministers had complained the year before, who
set his appointments on Lecture days and declared that by one play he
could teach more divinity than Mr. Willard or the Old Testament. Other
"provoking evils" show that not all the breaches in the walls were due
to outside attacks. A list of twelve such evils was drawn up in 1675,
and the crimes which were condemned, and which were said to be committed
chiefly by the younger sort, included immodest wearing of the hair by
men, strange new fashions of dress, want of reverence at worship,
profane cursing, tippling, breaking the Sabbath, idleness, overcharges
by the merchants, and the "loose and sinful habit of riding from town to
town, men and women together, under pretence of going to lectures, but
really to drink and revel in taverns." The law forbidding the keeping of
Christmas Day had to be repealed in 1681. Mrs. Randolph, when attending
Mr. Willard's preaching at the South Church, was observed "to make a
curtsey" at the name of Jesus "even in prayer time"; and the colony was
threatened with "gynecandrical or that which is commonly called Mixt or
Promiscuous Dancing," and with marriage according to the form of the
Established Church. The old order was changing, but not without
producing friction and bitterness of spirit. The orthodox brethren
stigmatized Ratcliffe as "Baal's priest," and the ministers from their
pulpits denounced the Anglican prayers as "leeks, garlick, and trash."
The upholders of the covenant were convinced that already "the Wild
Beasts of the Field" were assailing the colony.
Randolph journeyed on horseback twice to Rhode Island, and once to
Connecticut, serving his writs upon those colonies. Rhode Island agreed
willingly enough to surrender her charter without a suit, but the
authorities of Connecticut, knowing that the time for the return of the
writ had expired, gave no answer, debating among themselves whether it
would not be better, if they had to give in, to join New York rather
than Massachusetts. Randolph attributed their hesitation to their
dislike of Dudley, for whom he had begun to entertain an intense
aversion. He charged Dudley with connivance against himself,
interference with his work, appropriation of his fees, and too great
friendliness toward the old faction in Boston. Before the provisional
government had come to an end, he was writing home that Dudley was a
"false president," conducting affairs in his private interest, a
lukewarm supporter of the Anglican church, a backslider from his
Majesty's service, turning "windmill-like to every gale." Such was
Dudley's fate in an era of transition--hated by the old faction as an
appointee of the Stuarts and by Randolph as a weak servant of the Crown.
Writing in November, Randolph longed for the coming of the real
governor, who would put a check upon the country party and bring to an
end the time-serving and trimming of a president whom he deemed no
better than a Puritan governor.
The new Governor-General, who entered Boston harbor in the _Kingfisher_
on December 19, 1686, was Sir Edmund Andros, a few years before the Duke
of York's Governor for the propriety of New York. Andros at this time
was forty-nine years old; he was a soldier by training and a man of
considerable experience in positions requiring executive ability. His
career had been an honorable one, and no charges involving his honesty,
loyalty, or personal conduct had ever been entered against him. When he
was in New York, he had been brought on several occasions into contact
with the Massachusetts leaders, and though their relations had never
been sympathetic, they had not been unfriendly. While in England from
1681 to 1686, he had been freely consulted regarding the best method of
dealing with the problems in America and had shown himself in full
accord with that policy of the Lords of Trade which attempted to
consolidate the northern colonies into a single government for the
execution of the acts of trade and defense against the encroachments of
the French and Indians. He was probably fully aware of the difficulties
that confronted the new experiment, but as a soldier he was ready to
obey orders. His natural disposition and military training rendered him
impatient of obstacles, and his unfamiliarity with any form of popular
government--for New York had been controlled by a governor and council
only--made extremely uncertain his success in New England, where affairs
had been managed by the easy-going, dilatory method of debate and
discussion. As a disciplinarian, he could not appreciate the New
Englander's fondness for disputation and argument; as a soldier, he was
certain to obey to the full the letter of his instructions; and, as an
Anglican, he was likely to favor the church and churchmen of his choice.
He was not a diplomat, nor was he gifted with the silver tongue of
oratory or the spirit of compromise. He came to New England to execute a
definite plan, and he was given no discretion as to the form of
government he was to set up. He and his advisory council were to make
the laws, levy taxes, exercise justice, and command the militia. He was
not allowed to call a popular assembly or to recognize in any way the
highly prized institutions of the colony.
On December 20, Andros, his officers, and guard, clad in the brilliant
uniforms of soldiers of the British establishment, landed at Leverett's
wharf and marched through the local militia up King's Street to the Town
House, where he read his commission and administered the oaths. Except
for the royal commissioners of 1664, no British officer or soldier had
hitherto set foot on the streets of Boston. Redcoats had been sent to
New York and Virginia, but never before had they appeared in New
England, and this visible sign of British authority must have seemed to
many ominous for the future.
Andros's early impressions of what he saw were not flattering to the
colony. He found the people still suffering from the devastating effects
of the late war and further harassed by bad harvests, disasters at sea,
and two serious fires which had recently done much damage in the city.
He found the fortifications in bad repair, almost all the gun-carriages
unserviceable, no magazines of powder or other stores of war, no small
arms, except a few old matchlocks, and those unsizable and in poor
condition, no storehouses or accommodations for officers or soldiers,
and no adequate ramparts or redoubts.
Now the work that Andros had come over to perform, and that which was
most important in his eyes, was the defense of New England against the
French. The contest between the two nations for control of the New World
had already begun. The territory between Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence
and that between the Penobscot and the St. Croix were already in
dispute, and New Englanders had taken their part in the conflict. When
Governor of New York, Andros had become aware of the French danger, and
his successor Dongan had proved himself capable of holding the Iroquois
Indians to their allegiance to the English and of extending the beaver
trade in the Mohawk Valley. But at this juncture reports kept coming in
of renewed incursions of the French, led by the Canadian nobility, into
the regions south of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and of new forts on
territory that the English claimed as their own. There was increasing
danger that the French would embroil the Indians of the Five Nations
and, by drawing them into a French alliance, threaten not only the fur
trade but the colonies themselves. The French Governor, Denonville,
declared that the design of the King his master was the conversion of
the infidels and the uniting of "all these barbarous people in the bosom
of the Church"; but Dongan, though himself a Roman Catholic, saw no
truth in this explanation and demanded that the French demolish their
forts and retire to Canada, whence they had come. Just as this quarrel
with the French threatened to arouse the Indians in northwestern New
York, so it threatened to arouse, as eventually it did arouse, the
Indians along the northern frontier of New England. To the authorities
in England and to Andros in America, this menace of French aggression
was one of the dangers which the Dominion of New England was intended to
meet, and the substitution of a single civil and military head for the
slow-moving and ineffective popular assemblies was designed to make
possible an energetic military campaign.
Andros had no sooner organized his council and got his government into
running order than he began to prosecute measures for improving the
defenses of the colony. He sent soldiers to Pemaquid to occupy and
strengthen the fort there, and himself began the reconstruction of the
fortifications of Boston. He turned his attention to Fort Hill at the
lower end of the town, erected a palisaded embankment with four
bastions, a house for the garrison, and a place for a battery; later he
leveled the hill on Castle Island in the harbor, and built there a
similar palisade and earthwork and barracks for the soldiers. He took a
survey of military stores, made application to England for guns and
ammunition, endeavored to put the train-bands of the colony in as good
shape as possible, and in 1688 went to Pemaquid to inspect the northern
defenses as far as the Penobscot. He kept in close touch with Governor
Dongan, and promised to send him, as rapidly as he could, men and money
in case of a French invasion.
To make his work more effective he took steps to bring Connecticut
immediately under his control. Rhode Island had already submitted and
had sent its members to sit with the council at Boston. But Connecticut
had avoided giving a direct answer, although a third writ of _quo
warranto_ had been served upon her, on December 28, 1686. Consequently
Andros wrote to the recalcitrant colony, saying that he had been
instructed to receive the surrender of the charter. To this letter, the
Governor and magistrates of Connecticut replied that they preferred to
remain as they were, but that, if annexation was to be their lot, they
would be willing to join with Massachusetts, their old neighbor and
friend, rather than with New York. Dongan, perplexed by the heavy
expenses involved in the military defense of his colony and wishing to
have the use of additional revenues, had hoped that he might persuade
the Connecticut Government to come under the control of New York, but
Connecticut preferred Massachusetts and had stated this preference in
her letter. Andros and the Lords of Trade deemed the reply favorable,
although in fact it was ingeniously noncommittal, and they took steps
to complete the annexation.
On receiving a special letter of instructions from the King, Andros set
out in person for Hartford, accompanied by a number of gentlemen, two
trumpeters, and a guard of fifteen or twenty redcoats, "with small guns
and short lances in the tops of them." He journeyed probably by way of
Norwich, crossing the Connecticut River at Wethersfield, where he was
met by a troop of sixty cavalry and escorted to Hartford. There, on
October 31, 1687, the Governor, magistrates, and militia awaited his
coming. Seated in the Governor's chair in the tavern chamber where the
assembly was accustomed to meet, he caused his commission to be read,
declared the old Government dissolved, selected two of those present as
members of his council, and the next day appointed the necessary
officials for the colony. Thence he went to Fairfield, New Haven, and
New London, commissioning justices of the peace for those counties and
organizing the customs service. No resistance was made to his
proceedings, though it was generally understood in the colony that the
charter itself had been spirited away and hidden in the hollow of an oak
tree, henceforth famous as the Charter Oak.
Connecticut and the other colonies became for the time being
administrative districts of the larger dominion. Their assemblies
everywhere ceased to meet, that of Rhode Island for five years. Courts,
provided by the act of December, 1687, were, however, generally held.
The superior court for Connecticut sat four times in 1688 and the county
courts, quarter sessions and common pleas, where appeared the newly
appointed justices of the peace, sat for Hartford County, the one ten
times and the other thirteen times during 1688 and 1689. But the
surviving records of their meetings are few and references to their work
very rare. The ordinary business of everyday life was carried on by the
towns alone, which continued their usual activities undisturbed. In
Connecticut, before Andros arrived, the assembly had taken the
precaution to issue formal patents of land to the towns and to grant the
public lands of the colony to Hartford and Windsor to prevent their
falling into the hands of the new Government. This act may at the time
have seemed a wise one, but it made a great deal of trouble afterwards.
The Dominion of New England, which now extended from the Penobscot to
the borders of New York, was organized as a centralized government,
with the old colonies serving as counties for administration and the
exercise of justice. But as plans for an expedition against the French
began to mature, it became evident that, if the French were to be
successfully met, a further extension of territory was necessary; so in
April, 1688, a second commission was issued to Andros, constituting him
Governor of all the territory from the St. Croix River to the fortieth
parallel, and thus adding to his domain New York and the Jerseys.
Delaware and Pennsylvania were excepted by special royal intervention.
Dongan was recalled, and Francis Nicholson was appointed
lieutenant-governor under Andros, with his residence in New York.
Thus on paper Andros was Governor-General of a single territory running
from the Delaware River and the northern boundary of Pennsylvania
northward to the St. Lawrence, eastward to the St. Croix, and westward
to the Pacific. There was an attempt here to reproduce, in size and
organization, the French Dominion of Canada, but the likeness was only
in appearance. To organize and defend his territory, Andros had two
companies of British regulars, half a dozen trained officers, the local
train-bands, which were not to be depended on for distant service, and
a meager supply of guns and ammunition. Instead of having under him a
body of colonials, such as were the belligerent gentlemen of Canada, who
were eager to take part in raids against the English and who led their
savage followers with the craft of the redskin and the intelligence of
the white man, he had many separate groups of people. Averse to war and
accustomed to govern themselves, most of these distrusted him and wanted
to be rid of him, and desired only the restoration of their old
governments without regard to those dangers which they were fully
convinced they could meet quite as well themselves.
Though Andros's authority stretched over such an enormous territory, his
actual government was confined to Massachusetts and the northern
frontier. He paid very little attention to Connecticut, Plymouth, and
Rhode Island. With but two or three exceptions, the meetings of his
council were held in Boston; the laws passed affected the people of that
colony; and the complaints against him were chiefly of Massachusetts
origin. Massachusetts was his real enemy, and it was Massachusetts that
finally overthrew him. Andros was a soldier who never forgot the main
object of his mission, and it is hardly surprising that he showed
neither tact nor patience in his dealings with a colony that did little
else but check and thwart the plans that had been entrusted to him for
execution. The people of Massachusetts charged him with tyranny and
despotism. Their leaders, many of whom were members of his council,
complained of the council proceedings, which, they said, were controlled
by Andros and his favorites, so that debate was curtailed, objections
were overruled, and the vote of the majority was ignored. There is much
truth in the charge, for Andros was self-willed, imperious, and
impatient of discussion. On the other hand the Puritan leaders
inordinately loved controversy and debate. If Andros was peremptory, the
Puritan councillors were obstructive.
A more legitimate charge was the absence of a representative assembly
and the levying of taxes by the fiat of the council. But Andros had no
choice in this matter: he was compelled to govern according to his
instructions. Not only was his treasury usually empty, but he was always
confronted with the heavy expense of fortification and of protecting the
frontier. He does not appear to have been excessive in his demands, and
in case of any unusual levies, as of duties and customs, he referred
the matter to the Crown for its consent. But, as Englishmen, the people
preferred to levy their own taxes and considered any other method of
imposition as contrary to their just rights. Andros consequently had a
great deal of trouble in raising money. Even in the council, tax laws
were passed with difficulty, and the people of Essex County, notably in
town meetings at Topsfield and Ipswich, protested vigorously against the
levying of a rate without the consent of an assembly. John Wise, the
Ipswich minister, and others were arrested and thrown into jail, and on
trial Wise, according to his own report of the matter, was told by
Dudley, the chief-justice, "You have no more privileges left you than to
be sold as slaves." Wise was fined and suspended from the ministry, and
it is possible that his recollection of events was affected by the
punishment imposed.
In the matter of property, land titles, quit-rents, and fees, the
colonists had warrant for their criticism and their displeasure. Many of
those whom Andros associated with himself were New Yorkers who had
served with considerable success in their former positions, but who had
all the characteristics of typical royal officials. To the average
English officeholder of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, office
was considered not merely an opportunity for service but also an
opportunity for profit. Hitherto Massachusetts had been free from men of
this class, common enough elsewhere and destined to become more common
as the royal colonies increased in number. Palmer, the judge, Graham,
the attorney-general, and West, the secretary, hardly deserve the stigma
of placemen, for they possessed ability and did their duty as they saw
it, but their standards of duty were different from those held in
Massachusetts. People in England did not at this time view public office
as a public trust, which is a modern idea. Appointments under the Crown
went by purchase or favor, and, once obtained, were a source of income,
a form of investment. Massachusetts and other New England colonies were
far ahead of their time in giving shape to the principle that a public
official was the servant of those who elected him, but to such men as
Randolph and West and the whole office-holding world of this period,
such an idea was unthinkable. They served the King and for their service
were to receive their reward, and such men in America looked on fees and
grants of land as legitimate perquisites. In New York they had been
able to gratify their needs, but in Massachusetts such a view of office
ran counter to the traditions and customs of the place, and attempts to
apply it caused resentment and indignation. The efforts of these men,
among whom Randolph was the prince of beggars, to obtain grants of land,
to destroy the validity of existing titles, to levy quit-rents, and to
exact heavy fees, were a menace to the prosperity of the colony; while
the further attempt to destroy the political importance of the towns by
prohibiting town meetings, except once a year, was an attack on one of
the most fundamental parts of the whole New England system. Andros
himself, though laboring to break the resisting power of the colony,
never used his office for purposes of gain.
That the Massachusetts people should oppose these attempts to alter the
methods of government which had been in vogue for half a century was
inevitable, though some of the means they employed were certainly
disingenuous. Their leaders, both lay and clerical, were unsurpassed in
genius for argument and at this time outdid themselves. When Palmer was
able to show that, according to English law, their land-titles were in
many cases defective, they fell back on an older title than that of the
Crown and derived their right from God, "according to his Grand Charter
to the Sons of Adam and Noah." More culpable was the revival of the
unfortunate habit of misrepresentation and calumny which had too often
characterized the treatment of the enemy in Boston, and the spreading of
rumors that Andros, who spent a part of the winter of 1688-1689 in Maine
taking measures for defense, was in league with the French and was
furnishing the Indians with arms and ammunition for use against the
English. Such reports represent perhaps merely the desperate and
half-hysterical methods of a people who did not know where to turn for
the protection of their institutions. A wiser and shrewder move was made
in the spring of 1688, when a group of prominent men determined to
appeal to England for relief and sent Increase Mather, the influential
pastor of the old North Church, across the ocean to plead their cause
with the Crown.
But relief was nearer than they expected. On November 5, 1688, William
of Orange, summoned from Holland to uphold the constitutional liberties
of Protestant England, landed at Torbay, and before the end of the year
James II had fled to France. Rumors of the projected invasion had come
to Boston as early as December, and reports of its success had reached
the ears of the people there during the March following. Finally on
April 4, John Winslow, arriving from Nevis, brought written copies of
the Prince's declaration, issued from Holland, and two weeks later, on
April 18, the leaders in the city, including many members of Andros's
council, supported by the people of Boston and its neighborhood, rose in
revolt, overthrew the government of Andros, and brought tumbling down
the whole structure of the Dominion of New England, which had never from
the beginning had any real or stable foundation. Having armed
themselves, they seized Captain George, commander of the royal frigate,
the _Rose_, lying in the harbor, as he came ashore to find out the cause
of the noise and the tumult. Then they moved on to Fort Hill, where
Andros, Randolph, and others had taken refuge. Here they defied the
soldiers, who refused to fire, captured the fort, and carried their
prisoners off to be lodged in private houses or the common jail. On the
following day, they forced the Castle Island fort in the harbor to
surrender and then imprisoned its commander; they demanded of the
lieutenant in charge the delivery of the royal frigate and carried off
the sails; and as nothing would satisfy the country people who came
armed into the town in the afternoon but the closer confinement of
Andros, they removed him from the private house where he had been lodged
to the fort in the town. So excited was the populace and so serious the
danger of injury to those in confinement, that West, Palmer, and Graham
were sent to the fort on Castle Island for protection; Andros, after two
futile attempts at escape, was lodged in the same quarters, while
Randolph, as deserving of no consideration, was thrust ignominiously
into jail. On the third day a council of safety, consisting of
thirty-seven members, with the old Governor, Bradstreet, eighty-six
years old, at its head, was organized to prepare the way for the
reëstablishment of the former Government. The council summoned a
convention which, after hesitation and delay, authorized elections for a
House of Representatives and the resumption of all the old forms and
powers. On June 6, the assembly met, and to all appearances
Massachusetts was once more governing herself as if the charter had
never been annulled.
The other colonies followed the example of Massachusetts, and miniature
revolutions took place in Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, where
the Andros commissions offered few obstacles to the renewal of the old
forms. In a majority of cases the old officials were at hand, ready to
take up their former duties. Plymouth, having no charter, simply
returned to her old way of life, precarious and uncertain as it was; but
Rhode Island and Connecticut took the position that as their charters
had not been vacated by law, they were still valid and had not been
impaired by the brief intermission in the governments provided by them.
In this opinion the colonies were upheld by the law officers in England.
Before the middle of the summer, practically all traces of the Andros
régime had disappeared, except for the prisoners in confinement at
Boston and the bitterness which still rankled in the hearts of the
people of Massachusetts. There was no such intensity of feeling in the
other colonies, where the loss of the assembly was the main grievance,
though in Connecticut the resumption of authority by the old leaders
roused the animosity of a small but energetic faction which said that
the charter was dead and could not be revived, and demanded a closer
dependence on the Crown. Henceforth, that colony had to reckon with a
hostile group within its own borders, one that deemed the institutions
and laws of the colony oppressive and unjust, and that for a time
resisted the authority of what its leaders called a "pretended"
government. During the years that followed, these men made many efforts
to break down the independence of the corporate government, and to this
extent the rule of Andros left a permanent mark upon the colony.
CHAPTER XI
THE END OF AN ERA
But the future of the New England colonies was to be decided in England
and not in America. If the orthodox leaders in the colony thought that
the new King had levelling sympathies or would thrust aside the policy
already adopted by the English authorities for the defense of the
colonies and the maintenance of the acts of trade, they greatly
misjudged the situation. King William, though a Protestant, was no lover
of revolution, and, though he had himself engaged in one, he could
assert the dignity of the prerogative with as much vigor as any Stuart.
He was not a politician, but a soldier, and he was quite as likely to
see the necessity of organizing New England for defense against the
enemy as he was to listen favorably to appeals from Massachusetts for a
restoration of her charter.
Increase Mather had gone to England in 1688 to petition James II for
relief from the burdens of the Andros rule. His impressive personality,
his power as a ready and forcible speaker, his resourcefulness and
energy, and his acquaintance with influential men in England, both
Anglicans and Dissenters, made him the most effective agent who had ever
gone to England in the interest of the colony. He was able to bring the
grievances of Massachusetts to the personal attention of James II; and
he had received hope of a confirmation of land titles and permission to
call a general assembly, when the flight of the King brought his efforts
to naught. He then turned to the new Parliament, hoping to save the
colony by means of a rider to the bill for restoring corporations to
their ancient rights and privileges; but the dissolution of this body
ended hopeful efforts in that direction also. A year's "Sisyphean labor"
came to nothing. No remedy remained except an appeal to the new King,
and during 1690 and 1691, the reconstruction of Massachusetts became one
of the most important questions brought before the Lords of Trade.
William III and his advisers were agreed on one point: that
Massachusetts should never again be independent as she formerly had
been, but should be brought within the immediate control of the Crown,
through a governor of the King's appointment. They took the ground that,
with a French war already begun, it was no time to discuss colonial
rights and privileges, for the demands of the empire took precedence
over all questions of a merely local character in America.
Andros was now recalled and instructions were sent to Massachusetts to
release all her prisoners. With their arrival in England in February,
1690, the debate before the committee went on in a new and livelier
fashion. Randolph renewed his complaints in every form known to his
inventive mind; Andros presented his defense and was relieved of all
charges of mal-administration; Mather and others contested every move of
their opponents and sought to obtain as favorable terms as possible for
Massachusetts; while Oakes and Cooke, sent over by the colony as its
official agents and representing the uncompromising Puritan wing,
hindered rather than helped the cause by insisting that no concessions
should be made and that Massachusetts should receive a confirmation of
all her former privileges. Mather's success was noteworthy. He could not
prevent the appointment of a royal governor or the separation of New
Hampshire from Massachusetts, nor could he obtain the right of coinage
for the colony; but he did secure the permanent annexation of Maine and
the Plymouth colony, and a large measure of appointive power and
legislative control for the people. In some ways most significant of
all, he obtained from the Crown the noteworthy concession that the
council of the colony should be chosen by the general assembly and not
be appointed from England, as was the case with all the other royal
colonies. Even New Hampshire eventually had the same governor as
Massachusetts, thus preserving a union for all central and northern New
England, which was destined to last for forty-four years.
The charter of 1691 was a compromise between the old government which
had existed in Massachusetts since 1630 and that of a regular royal
colony, and as such it satisfied neither party. It was greeted in
Massachusetts with vehement disapproval by the old faction, who charged
Mather with flagrantly deserting his trust; and in England it was viewed
as a shameful concession to the whims of the Puritans. This yoking
together of parts of two systems, corporate and royal, was to give rise
in Massachusetts in the succeeding century to a struggle for control
that deeply affected the course of the colony's later history.
* * * * *
In all the New England colonies, the fall of Andros and the close of the
century marked the end of an era in which the dominant impulse was the
religious purpose that actuated the original colonists in coming to
America. The desire for a political isolation that would preserve the
established religious system intact was exceedingly strong in the
seventeenth century, but it ceased to be as strong in the century that
followed. The fathers gave way to the children; the settlements grew
rapidly in size, increased their output of staple products beyond what
they needed for themselves, and became vastly interested in trade and
commerce with all parts of the Atlantic world. Towns grew into larger
towns and cities; and Portsmouth, Newbury, Salem, Marblehead, Boston,
Newport, New London, Hartford, Wethersfield, Middletown, New Haven,
Fairfield, and Stamford became, in varying degrees, centers of an
increasing population and of new business interests that brought New
England into closer contact with the other colonies, with the West
Indies, and with the Old World. England became involved in the long
struggle with France and not only called on the colonies to aid her in
military campaigns against the French in America, but endeavored to
bring them within the scope of her colonial empire. All these influences
tended to expand the life of New England and to force its people more
and more out of their isolation. Yet, despite this fact, the Puritan
colonies--Connecticut and Rhode Island especially--continued to lie in
large part outside the pale of British control and example, and their
inhabitants continued to accept religion and the Puritan standards of
morals as the guide of their daily lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The standard authority on the subjects treated in the volume is J. G.
Palfrey, _History of New England_, 5 vols. (1858-1864, 1875-1890), a
work of broad scholarship and written in a not uninteresting style, but
indiscriminating in its defense of Massachusetts and without any
understanding of the purpose and attitude of the English authorities. In
somewhat the same class are G. E. Ellis, _The Puritan Age_ (1888), a dry
book but less given to special pleading, and Justin Winsor, _The
Memorial History of Boston_, 4 vols. (1880-1882), a series of essays
with elaborate notes and bibliographies, presenting in a fragmentary way
the conventional view of the period. Less frankly favorable to New
England is J. A. Doyle, _English Colonies in America: The Puritan
Colonies_, 2 vols. (1887), a work of value, but diffuse in style and
often confused in treatment, and, though written by an Englishman,
displaying little interest in the English side of the story. The
chapters in Edward Channing, _History of the United States_, vol. i
(1905), that relate to the subject, are scholarly and always
interesting; while those in H. L. Osgood, _The American Colonies in the
Seventeenth Century_, 3 vols. (1904-1907), contain the ablest accounts
we have of the institutional characteristics of the period.
There are few good histories of the individual colonies. Those deserving
of mention are: Thomas Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay_, 2
vols. (1764-1767); S. G. Arnold, _History of the State of Rhode Island_,
2 vols. (4th ed. 1894); Irving B. Richman, _Rhode Island_ (1904,
American Commonwealth Series); B. Trumbull, _Complete History of
Connecticut_, 2 vols. (new ed. 1898); A. Johnson, _Connecticut_ (2d ed.
1903, American Commonwealth Series); E. Atwater, _History of the Colony
of New Haven_ (1881); W. H. Fry, _New Hampshire as a Royal Province_
(1908); W. D. Williamson, _History of the State of Maine_ (1832); H. S.
Burrage, _The Beginnings of Colonial Maine_ (1914). Hutchinson and
Trumbull are classics; Arnold is one of the best of the state histories;
Richman and Johnson are short and readable; Fry deals with the
institutional life of the colony; Williamson is old-fashioned and poor;
but Burrage is authoritative.
Special works are: H. M. Dexter, _The England and Holland of the
Pilgrims_ (1905), a very valuable and learned account; C. F. Adams,
_Three Episodes of Massachusetts History_, 2 vols. (1892), treating of
the antecedents of Boston, the Antinomian Controversy, and church and
town government, the first essay especially being indispensable; R. M.
Jones, _The Quakers in the American Colonies_ (1911), the fairest
account of the Quakers in New England. W. De L. Love, _The Colonial
History of Hartford_ (1914); W. E. Weeden, _Early Rhode Island_ (1910);
and G. S. Kimball, _Providence in Colonial Times_ (1912), are in every
way excellent, that of Love being a minutely critical analysis of the
Connecticut settlement. W. E. Weeden, _Social and Economic History of
New England_, 2 vols. (1891), is a valuable collection of information.
Certain chapters in Edward Eggleston's _Transit of Civilization_ (1901)
treat of the mental outfit of the colonists; and M. W. Jernegan in the
_School Review_, June, 1915, deals with the beginnings of public
education in New England; G. L. Beer, _Origins of the British Colonial
System_, 1660-1688, 2 vols. (1912), and C. M. Andrews, _British
Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations_,
1622-1675 (1908), concern British policy and administration in the
seventeenth century.
Biographies varying greatly in value and manner of treatment follow: R.
C. Winthrop, _Life and Letters of John Winthrop_, 2 vols. (2d ed. 1869);
G. L. Walker, _Thomas Hooker_ (1891, Makers of America Series); J. H.
Twichell, _John Winthrop_ (1891, _id._); A. Steele, _Elder Brewster_
(1857); L. G. Jones, _Samuel Gorton_ (1896); A. Gorton, _The Life and
Times of Samuel Gorton_ (1907); O. S. Straus, _Roger Williams_ (1894);
M. E. Hall, _Roger Williams_ (1917); T. W. Bicknell, _Story of Dr. John
Clarke_ (1915); J. M. Taylor, _Roger Ludlow_ (1900); J. K. Hosmer,
_Young Sir Harry Vane_ (1888); _A Memoir of Sir John Leverett, Knt._
(1856); and in _American Biography_, 10 vols., are lives of John Mason
by G. E. Ellis, Roger Williams by William Gammell, Samuel Gorton by John
M. Mackie, and Anne Hutchinson by G. E. Ellis, though none of them is
particularly satisfactory.
The original sources for the period are: the _Acts of the Privy Council,
Colonial_, vols. i, ii (1908-1910); _The Calendar of State Papers,
Colonial_, vols. i-viii, 1574-1692 (1860-1901); and the colonial records
of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New
Hampshire. Collections of narratives and letters may be found in the
publications of the Prince Society [C. H. Bell, _John Wheelwright and
his Writings_ (1876); C. F. Adams, _Morton's New England Canaan_ (1883);
C. W. Tuttle, _Capt. John Mason_ (1887); J. P. Baxter, _Sir Ferdinando
Gorges_, 3 vols. (1890); C. F. Adams, _Antinomianism in the Colony of
Massachusetts Bay_ (1894); R. N. Toppan, _Edward Randolph_, 7 vols.
(1898-1909, last two volumes edited by A. T. S. Goodrick)]; and in the
_Original Narratives of Early American History_ [W. T. Davis,
_Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation_ (1908); J. K. Hosmer,
_Winthrop's Journal_, 2 vols. (1908); J. F. Jameson, _Johnson's
Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England_ (1911); C.
H. Lincoln, _Narratives of the Indian Wars_ (1913); G. L. Burr,
_Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases_ (1914); C. M. Andrews, _Narratives
of the Insurrections_ (1915)]. A sumptuous edition of Bradford's history
has been edited for the Massachusetts Historical Society, by W. C. Ford,
2 vols. (1915). S. Sewall's _Diary_, 3 vols. (Mass. Hist. Soc. _Coll._,
5th series, 1878-1882) and Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, 2 vols. (1853)
are important. W. Walker, _The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism_
(1893) is of great value. C. W. Sawyer, _Firearms in American History_
(1910), has an excellent chapter on firearms in colonial times.
The articles on _Boston_, _New England_, _Massachusetts_, _Plymouth_,
_Friends_ (_Society of_), etc., in _The Encyclopædia Britannica_, 11th
Edition, should be referred to for additional bibliographies.
INDEX
Agawam (Springfield), 61, 62
Allerton, Isaac, 17
_Ambrose, The_, ship, 29
Amsterdam, Separatists gather at, 7
"Ancient and Honorable Artillery," 135
Andros, Sir Edmund, takes part in case against Massachusetts, 156;
Governor of Massachusetts, 174 _et seq._;
strengthens fortifications, 179-80;
New York and New Jersey added to his domain, 183-84;
attention confined to Massachusetts, 184-85;
recalled, 196
_Anne, The_, ship, 13
Aquidneck, Island of, 48, 55
_Arabella, The_, ship, 29
Aspinwall, 48
Augsburg, settlement of (1555), 4
Aulnay-Charnisé, Charles de Menou, Sieur d', 95-96
Bartlett, Robert, 84
Bay Colony, _see_ Massachusetts Bay Colony
Blackstone, William, 23, 24
_Blessing of the Bay, The_, ship, 78
Boston, Puritans from England settle at, 29;
half the colonists live in or near, 35;
treatment of Quakers in, 79-80;
importance of, 164;
grows into a city, 198;
_see also_ Shawmut
Boswell. Sir William, quoted, 97
Bradford, William, in Scrooby, 7;
quoted, 15-16;
Governor of Plymouth, 17;
_History of Plimouth Plantation_, 19;
dead before 1660, 78
Bradstreet, Governor of Massachusetts, 191
Bradstreet, Simon, 103
Branford, (Conn.), 70
Brenton, Governor, quoted, 114
Brewster, William, father of William, elder of Plymouth, 6
Brewster, William, Elder of Plymouth, 6, 8
Browne, John, 41
Browne, Samuel, 41
Bulkeley, Peter, 156
Cambridge platform (1648), 79
Canonchet, Indian chief, 142, 143, 144
Carr, Sir Robert, 119, 122
Cartwright, George, Colonel, 119, 122
Carver, John, Governor of Plymouth, 13
_Charity, The_, ship, 13
Charlestown (Mass.), 29, 35
Charter Oak, 181
Child, Dr. Robert, 38, 116
Church, Benjamin, Captain, 142
Clarendon, Lord, Prime Minister of England, 113, 116, 117, 120-21, 126
Clark, John, of Newbury, 83
Clarke, Dr. John, 47, 48, 103, 106, 112, 113
Clayton, Richard, 6
Coddington, William, 43, 47, 48, 49, 54-55
Coggeshall, one of founders of Portsmouth, 48
Connecticut, leaders who influenced, 47;
settled by Massachusetts people, 56;
four claimants for, 57;
migration from Massachusetts, 57-61;
commission government, 60-61;
government, 62-64;
witchcraft in, 81;
sends petition to England, 103-04;
charter granted (1662), 108;
extends authority of colony, 108-10;
claims Long Island, 130;
title under charter recognized by Massachusetts, 131;
debates joining New York, 173;
Andros endeavors to bring under control, 180;
consents to join Massachusetts, 180-82;
renews old forms, 192
Cooke, a leader of conservatives in Boston, 164
Cotton, John, 78
Council for Foreign Plantations, Committee of the, 34
Danforth, a leader of conservatives in Boston, 164
Davenport, John, of New Haven, 47, 67, 68, 78, 111, 112
Deerfield (Mass.), massacre of, 141
Delfthaven, Pilgrims embark at, 10
Denonville, Marquis de, Governor of Canada, 178
Denton, Richard, 70
Desborough, 78
Dongan, Colonel, Governor of New York, 178, 180, 183
Dorchester (Mass.), 35
Dover (N. H.), 65, 66
Downing, Emanuel, 35
Dudley, Joseph, 168, 169-70, 173-74
Dudley, Thomas, 28
Dyer, Mary, 80
Eaton, Samuel, 67
Eaton, Theophilus, 47, 67, 68, 69
Education in New England, 83-85
Eliot, John, 94
Endecott, John, in congregation of Rev. John White, 24;
sent as governor to Salem, 25;
disregards claims of Gorges, 26;
defaces royal ensign at Salem, 32;
banishes colonists for religious differences, 41;
signs petition to England, 104
England, in early seventeenth century, 2 _et seq._;
awakes to importance of colonies, 101-102;
new colonial policy, 102-103;
affairs in seventeenth century, 126-27;
attitude toward Massachusetts, 150;
finances under Charles II., 151-152;
future of New England decided in, 194
Exeter (N. H.), 65, 66
Fairfield (Conn.), 198
Feudal system in England, 2, 3
_Fortune, The_, ship, 13
Fuller, Dr. Samuel, 37, 83
Fundamental orders, 62-64
Gardiner, Sir Christopher, 31, 41
George, Captain of the _Rose_, 190
Gilds, 3-4
Goodyear, Stephen, 77
Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 22-23, 25, 26, 29-30, 30-34, 65
Gorges, Robert, 23, 25
Gorges, Thomas, 35
Gorton, Samuel, 49-51
Graham, Attorney-General of Massachusetts, 187, 191
"Great Fundamentals, The," 18
Greenwich (Conn.), 109, 133
Guilford (Conn.), 70, 109
Half-Way Covenant, 79, 93-94
Hampton (N. H.), 66
_Handmaid, The_, ship, 13
Hartford (Conn.), 61, 198
Harvard College, 84, 93
Hawkins, Jane, 83
Haynes, John, 35, 47, 58, 78
Higginson, Francis, 37
Hilton, Edward, 65
Holmes, O. W., quoted, 83
Holmes, William, 56
Hooke, 78
Hooker, Thomas, 47, 58, 60, 61, 62, 78
Hopkins, Edward, Governor, 84
House of Good Hope, 56
Humphrey, John, 28
Hutchinson, Anne, 41-42, 48, 98
Indians, trouble with, 133 _et seq._;
dealings with, 138-39;
number in New England, 139
_Jewel, The_, ship, 29
Johnson, Lady Arabella, 35
Johnson, Isaac, 28
Jones, Christopher, captain of the _Mayflower_, 11-12
King Philip's War (1675-76), 136, 138, 139, 140-46
_Kingfisher, The_, ship, 174
Kirke, Percy, Colonel, 166-67
Lathrop, John, 67
La Tour, Charles de, 95-96
Laud, Archbishop, 32
Laud Commission, 34
Leete, Governor, 111
Leyden, Separatists move to, 7
London, as a center of Separatism, 6
Long Island, uncertainty as to jurisdiction, 129-30
Ludlow, Roger, 47, 58, 78, 98
Lynn, Henry, 41
Maine, settled, 65;
under jurisdiction of Massachusetts, 66-67;
status undecided, 132;
military preparedness, 135;
permanently annexed to Massachusetts, 197
Marblehead (Mass.), 198
Mason, John, Captain, 30-31, 34, 65, 136
Massachusetts Bay Colony, 21 _et seq._;
begins as fishing venture, 24;
obtains patent for land, 25;
founded, 29;
Gorges attempts overthrow of, 30-34;
growth (1630-40), 34-36;
time of stress, 36;
government, 37-40;
religious intolerance, 41-43;
commercial ventures, 78;
leader among colonies, 100-01;
sends petition to King, 103;
restoration of Stuarts causes trouble for, 104-05;
charter confirmed, 105;
religious liberty defined by King, 105-06;
inquiry into affairs by Clarendon, 116-18;
commissioners sent to, 118 _et seq._;
franchise law modified, 121;
defies commission, 123-126;
recognizes Connecticut's title (1672), 131;
asserts right to control Maine and New Hampshire, 132;
military preparedness, 135;
Randolph inquires into affairs, 147;
new instructions to royal governors, 148-49;
attitude of England toward, 148-52;
inquiry by Randolph, 154-56;
mission sent to England, 156-57;
purchases title to Maine and estranges England further, 158-59;
royal orders in regard to trade and religious liberty, 159-60;
attitude toward England, 160-61;
sends agents to England, 162;
charter forfeited (1684), 163;
grows more liberal, 164;
territory enlarged, 166; a royal colony, 166 _et seq._;
preliminary royal government, 168-69;
changes in life of people, 170-73;
faults in royal government, 185-89;
government of Andros overthrown, 190;
resumes self-government, 191;
sends Mather to England, 194-96;
charter of 1691, 197
Massachusetts Bay Company, charter granted (1629), 26;
control passes to Puritans, 27
Massachusetts Commission, personnel, 118-19;
object, 120-121;
failure, 123-26
Mather, Cotton, quoted, 79
Mather, Increase, 194-95, 196
Maverick, Samuel, 23, 38, 116 _et seq._
_Mayflower, The_, ship, 10, 11
Mayflower Compact, 12-13
Merrymount, 22
Middletown (Conn.), 198
Milford (Conn.), 70
Mishawum (Charlestown), 24
Moody, Lady Deborah, 35
Morrell, 23
Morton, Thomas, 22, 31, 34, 41, 47
Mount Wollaston, 22
Mystic, taken into Connecticut, 109
Naumkeag (Salem), 25
New Amsterdam, seized by English, 110
New England, people of, 72-73;
settled by radicals, 73-74;
lack of toleration in, 74;
town life, 75-76;
local color in various settlements, 76-78;
witchcraft, 80-81;
superstitions of people, 81-82;
medicine and surgery, 82-83;
education, 83-85;
travel, 85-86;
homes, 86;
money, 86-87;
reckoning of time, 87;
respect for grants and charters, 88;
attitude toward England, 88-90;
organization in, 89;
rivalry with Dutch and French, 90-91;
confederation of colonies, 91 _et seq._;
trouble with the French, 94-96;
trouble with the Dutch, 96-98;
period of readjustment, 129 _et seq._;
Indian troubles, 133 _et seq._;
boundary disputes, 133;
population, 139;
menace from French, 177-79;
Dominion of, 182-83;
brought closer to English control, 199
_New England Canaan_, Morton, 32
New England Confederation _see_ United Colonies of New England
New England Council, 9, 12, 22, 26, 30, 32-33
New Hampshire, influential leaders in, 47;
controversy over title, 65;
under jurisdiction of Massachusetts, 66-67;
separation from Massachusetts, 67, 71;
status undecided, 132;
military preparedness, 135
New Haven, influential leaders in, 47;
settled, 67-68;
government, 68-70;
combines other plantations under her, 70-71;
absorbed by Conn., 71;
commercial ventures, 77-78;
witchcraft in, 81;
misfortunes of, 110-11;
surrenders to Connecticut, 111-12;
confederation dissolved, 112
New London (Conn.), 198
New Netherlands, conquest of, 122
New Somersetshire, 65
Newark, founded, 112
Newbury, 198
Newport (R. I.), 49, 198
Nicholson, Francis, 183
Nicolls, Richard, 118, 119, 122
Norfolk, a center of Separatism, 6
Norton, John, 103
Nowell, a leader of conservatives in Boston, 164
Oldham, John, 56
Palmer, Judge, 187, 191
Partridge, Captain, 54, 55
Pawcatuck, taken into Connecticut, 109
Pequot War (1637), 136-37
Peters, Hugh, 59, 78
Pierson, Abraham, 46, 47, 112
Pilgrims, leave for Holland (1607-08), 7;
reasons for leaving Holland, 8;
decide to go to America, 8-9;
conditions under which expedition was undertaken, 10;
journey of the _Mayflower_, 10-12;
draw up covenant, 12;
life in Plymouth Colony, 14-19;
greatness lies in religious influence, 19-20
Plymouth Colony, founded, 12-20;
secures right to establish fishing colony, 24;
submits to authority of Massachusetts, 71;
fishing and trading, 77;
witchcraft in, 81;
sends mission to England, 104;
military preparedness, 135;
renews old forms, 192;
permanently annexed to Massachusetts, 197
Plymouth, town of, 18
Pocasset (Portsmouth), 48
Portsmouth (N. H.), 66, 198
Portsmouth (R. I.), 51-52; _see also_ Pocasset
Protestantism, controlled by state, 4
Providence, settled, 47-48;
court of arbitration at, 51;
charter unites with other settlements, 53;
government under patent, 53-54
Puritans, obtain control of Massachusetts Bay Company, 27;
reach Salem (1630), 29;
become Separatists, 37;
characteristics of the frontier, 46-47
Pynchon, William, 60, 62, 77
Quakers, come to Boston (1656), 79;
treatment, 79-80
Quinnipiac, 68
Randolph, Edward, 147, 152-156, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 173, 174,
196
Ratcliffe, Philip, 31, 41
Ratcliffe, Robert, 168-69, 171, 173
Reformation, The, 3
Rhode Island, leaders in, 47;
individualism in, 56;
colony of separatism, 79;
not included in Confederation of colonies, 92;
applies for charter, 103;
conflicting boundary claims, 113;
charter granted, (1663), 113-14;
rival claims to, 115;
unsettled conditions, 131;
surrenders charter, 173;
sends council members to Boston, 180;
renews old forms, 192
Rhode Island settlements, Providence, 47-48;
Pocasset, 48-49;
Newport, 49;
Shawomet or Warwick, 49
Robinson, John, 6-7, 8
Rossiter, Bray, of Guilford, 83, 111
Rowlandson, Mrs., 143
Roxbury (Mass.), 35
Salem (Mass.), 25, 198;
_see also_ Naumkeag
Salem witchcraft, 81
Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 28, 35
Saybrook, 33, 40
Saye and Sele, Lord, 33, 106-07
Scott, John, Captain, 109, 130
Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, a center of Separatism, 6
Separatists, 5 _et seq._
Setauket, 130
Shawmut (Boston), 23
Shawomet, 49
Sheffield, Lord, 24
Slavery forbidden in Rhode Island (1652), 54
Smith, John, 3, 11
Southold on Long Island, 70, 109
_Speedwell, The_, ship, 10
Springfield (Mass), becomes part of Mass., 62;
center of fur trade, 77;
_see also_ Agawam
Stamford (Conn.), 70, 109, 133, 198
Standish, Miles, 3
Stiles party, 57
Stone, Samuel, 60
Stoughton, William, 156
Stuyvesant, Peter, 97, 109
_Talbot, The_, ship, 29
Uncas, Indian chief, 137
Underhill, 47
United Colonies of New England, 91
Vane, Henry, 33, 35, 40, 59
Vassall, William, 38
Virginia Company of London, 9
Virginia Company of Plymouth, 9
Walford, 24, 41
Warwick, Earl of, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32
Warwick, a Rhode Island settlement, 49
Watertown (Mass.), 35
Wessagusset (Quincy), 21, 22, 23
West, Secretary of Mass., 187, 191
Weston, Thomas, 10, 21
Wethersfield (Conn.), 61, 198
Weymouth (Mass.), 23
Wheelwright, John, 47, 65
White, Rev. John, 24, 27
Whitfield, 78
Whiting, 78
Williams, Roger, driven from Boston, 47;
locates at Providence, 47-48;
obtains charter, 52-53;
quoted, 54;
goes to England to confirm patent, 55;
in 1660, 78
Windsor (Conn.), 61
Winnissimmet (Chelsea), 23-24
Winslow, Edward, 17, 38, 50, 52
Winslow, John, 190
Winslow, Josiah, General, 142
Winthrop, John, elected Governor of Mass. Bay Colony, 28;
leader among the Puritans, 35;
died before 1660, 78
Winthrop, John, son of the Governor, 40, 59, 83, 103-04, 106-07
Wise, John, 186
Witchcraft in New England, 80-81
Wollaston, Captain, 22
Wright, Richard, 41
Young, Alse, 81
Young, Captain, 130
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| Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the |
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| Typographical errors corrected in the text: |
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| Page 57 irreconciliable changed to irreconcilable |
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